The Venus Assault

by Felix R. Savage

  The sun tubes drifted overhead, so big and bright and close that Elfrida felt the heat through her spacesuit, and thought about the legend of Icarus, who had flown too close to the sun. “Keep your head down!” Yonezawa shouted. She could smell dust particles being incinerated on the sun tubes’ surfaces.

  After a petrifying moment, the glider’s velocity carried it out of the freefall zone. It sank outwards, its effective weight rapidly increasing, on a shallow angle that took it straight down into the church grounds. Elfrida tucked her feet up in advance. Yonezawa landed at a run on a scruffy lawn, followed by the rest of his team. Bells were pealing wildly. Elfrida wondered if they’d set off some kind of alarm.

  Yonezawa dismounted, his face shiny with sweat. “In case you’re wondering how we get back, we portage the gliders up there and launch from the top of the steeple.”

  He pointed up at the church. It was a classical gothic structure. Built in the early years, Elfrida surmised, when 11073 Galapagos must have had resources to spare. The steeple, improbably tall and skeletal, did indeed have a launch platform near the top—right under the bells that were swinging and ringing.

  “We’re so late,” the girl with the rash said.

  “Go ahead,” Yonezawa said. “I’ll just drop her off with Hirayanagi-shisai.” He glanced at Elfrida. “It’s like leading a blind person around.”

  Right after that, her sensors informed her that he was steering her by the elbow towards the back of the church. The others peeled off and scurried towards the front doors. Elfrida glimpsed a trickle of people heading into the church, old and young, chattering self-importantly, dressed in grey and black printables, all Japanese.

  Yonezawa indicated the trees they were passing under. “Somei yoshino. We brought the soil and the seeds with us. These are probably the last real sakura in the solar system.”

  That was the first reference to the tragedy that lay between them, the desolation of Japan. But Elfrida did not have time to respond. Yonezawa knocked on the door of a separate house, a neat little cottage built from asteroid rock. He glanced anxiously back at the church. The bells had stopped ringing.

  A man in frail old age answered the door. He wore a black cassock whose pleated skirts brushed the ground. He did a double take at the sight of Yumiko.

  “It’s a phavatar,” Yonezawa said. “The guys from Kharbage dropped it off. Can I just leave it with you until Mass is over, Hirayanagi-shisai? The remote operator does respond. You just have to be patient. I think she’s closer than Earth, but probably not on the Kharbage Can. She might be on that orbital facility the UN has at Venus. Her name’s Shimada Yumiko.”

  “I’ll look after her. Go on, go on.”

  Yonezawa dashed off. The man—the priest, Elfrida realized—regarded her frankly. A slight tightening of his lips betrayed the same revulsion Yonezawa and his friends had shown. But he spoke in polite Japanese.

  “Well, come in.”

  She followed him into a modest Western-style company room decorated with religious pictures and crucifixes.

  “Sit down, sit down. Would you like—no, of course you wouldn’t like tea or coffee. You are very realistic, you know.” Hirayanagi folded his hands on his lap and waited.

  Elfrida felt an enormous sense of relief that someone was willing to talk to her at her own pace. She said, “You’re very kind. Are you who I should be talking to about the arrangements I’ll need to make for my assessment?”

  Hirayanagi—Father Hirayanagi, she should be calling him—shook his head and smiled. “I don’t have anything to do with that. I didn’t even know about it. The shudokai handles everything to do with the outside. But I’m delighted to have this chance to chat with you.”

  “The shudokai? Who are they?”

  Father Hirayanagi, not yet having heard her, was still talking. “Are you from Earth, or somewhere else? I haven’t been to Earth since I was a child. You’ll have to tell me what it’s like these days.”

  Elfrida’s shoulders slumped as the situation became clear to her. Father Hirayanagi wasn’t her liaison person. Yonezawa had simply dumped her here because he was late for the service or meeting or whatever they called it. She could hear faint singing from the direction of the church.

  The sheer, insouciant haphazardness of her reception overwhelmed her. Hoping that Father Hirayanagi had some authority around here, she burst out, “May I be frank? You’re almost certainly going to be resettled. I haven’t even begun my assessment yet, but I’ve seen enough to know that it’s a matter of ticking the boxes. You’re so overcrowded in here—I’ve never seen anything like it. And everyone I’ve seen is obviously malnourished. Reddish-tinted hair, flaky rashes—I’m suspecting kwashiokor, although I’ll have to run some tests on volunteers to know for sure. I don’t even understand how you all survive. You must have exceeded the carrying capacity of this habitat about ten thousand people ago.”

  At this point Father Hirayanagi responded to her earlier question. “The shudokai? Oh, that’s the Order of St. Benedict of Passau. Not the Benedictines, they’re different. We haven’t any of them. We do have some Franciscans—I’m a Franciscan, in fact—but most of our young people join the shudokai nowadays. The lad who brought you here, he’s their leader. The First Knight of the Order of St. Benedict. He’s got a strong faith, real zeal for the Lord. The Yonezawa family are pillars of the community, regardless of what some say.”

  Elfrida listened to this, her head spinning, and decided to go on with what she had been saying. “I’m trying to warn you so that you’ll have time to prepare your people. In some cases we do see incidents of non-compliance, and that only makes it harder for everyone. I’m sure your people wouldn’t resist an evacuation order—” a total lie; after that confrontation on the surface, she was sure they would, “but it always helps if people have time to get used to the idea, and understand that it’s actually a change for the better.” She was saying, without being entirely aware of it—such was the slippery power of the propaganda she mouthed—Help me to destroy your world.

  That not-very-deeply-hidden meaning was far from lost on Father Hirayanagi. He reared back in his chair and went red. “This is impossible! It’s unacceptable. You can’t simply kick us out.”

  “Oh dear,” Elfrida sighed. “This is what I was afraid of.”

  When he heard that, his face went redder. “This is our asteroid. 11073 Galapagos. And we are Galapajin.”

  “Galapajin,” Elfrida said politely. “That’s a very interesting coinage. But I’m afraid it isn’t your asteroid.” It never had been. “It belongs to Kharbage, LLC, and they …” No, she thought. Stop. Just stop. You’re only antagonizing him. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she really was sorry. She wanted to cry for the poor, trembling, red-faced old priest. She was vaguely aware that her real body was pleading for food and water, and that mental fatigue was eroding her emotional detachment, but she ignored these alarm signals.

  They sat in silence for some moments. A clock ticked in the corner, keeping arbitrary asteroid time. More organ chords pealed out from the church.

  “That’s the closing hymn,” Father Hirayanagi said, stirring. “I expect Yonezawa will take you to the cathedral now. I’m sorry we couldn’t visit together for longer. Perhaps you can come back and we’ll have that chat about Earth. I’ve heard they use gondolas to get about in Tokyo these days! The city’s being rebuilt and people are moving back. Can that be true?”

  So this was how it was going to be. The priest’s lips shook when he tried to smile at her, but he was keeping up that oh-so-Japanese pretence of politeness. They were all going to listen to her without hearing her, and pretend and pretend that everything was hunky-dory, until the barge came to haul them off to Ceres.

  vi.

  Elfrida had shit stuck to her bottom. She’d been sitting in her own waste for hours. She smelled like a broken chemical toilet. “Oh God, this is disgusting,” she cried aloud. When she moved, her coverall chafed her thighs, cold and damp wit
h urine.

  She rolled off the couch and crumpled headfirst to the floor.

  Her legs, despite the gentle electrical stimuli applied by the couch to ward off cramps, had gone to sleep.

  Tears started from her eyes. She sniffled them back and wrenched off the heavy headset she wore, taking a few strands of hair with it. Then she pushed herself up on her elbows and crawled out of the cubicle like a dog with a broken spine. Too proud to call for help, she hoped like hell that no one saw her worming down the corridor like this, dragging her numb legs behind her.

  Her luck held; it was the middle of the night, after all. She’d been under for thirty-six hours. No one had disturbed her. You didn’t disturb people during telepresence sessions unless the station was literally burning down around your ears. The IV plugged into her cubital port had supplied her with a glucose drip, and beyond that, the hunger and thirst signals of the body were supposed to enforce natural limits on the length of sessions. Elfrida had ignored them. Her mouth tasted like a schoolchild’s hydroponics project left on the radiator overnight.

  She crawled to the slot in the wall that was laughingly called her cabin. It was the lowest of three, which spared her having to climb a ladder. She leaned through the hatch, grabbed her ready-bag, and made a beeline—if bees crawled—for the showers.

  The water pressure on Botticelli Station left a lot to be desired, but at that moment the trickle of hot water felt as luxurious as a plunge into the Adriatic. She scrubbed her bottom until it stung. When one shower timed itself off, she moved to the next one, and so on down the line, until she’d used up everyone’s washing water allowance for the next twelve hours. Tough. She felt a million times better.

  Next action item: food. The galley was always open. She ordered the bots to fix her a grilled cheese sandwich— “No, make that two grilled cheese sandwiches, plus a venti hot chocolate.” She went into the crew lounge to wait for it.

  There was already someone there: dos Santos. She was staring at a comedy vid on the viewport screen, a tablet on her lap. She brightened instantly. “Goto! You’re back with us.” She swung her feet to the floor and turned off the sound feed that only she could hear. “Some folks, such as Hardy, are very upset with you.” Dos Santos put on a mock-stern face. “He bet me fifty spiders you wouldn’t go a full sol, let alone a sol and a half.”

  It had not occurred to Elfrida to be proud of herself for exceeding her own physical limits, but now she felt as if she’d passed some kind of test she didn’t know she was taking. “My feet totally went to sleep,” she confessed with a broad grin. “I ended up crawling along the corridor like a dog that got run over. It was ridiculous.”

  “Yowch! I remember one killer session I did when I was based out on Titan. Just my luck, that was when the Luna raids happened. They pulled in every spare agent from all over the system. I was tasked with evacuating an entire dome full of pensioners, on a fourteen-minute latency period.”

  “Fourteen minutes!”

  “Yup. You want ridiculous, that was ridiculous. Luckily, the oldsters managed to get themselves to safety despite my help.”

  Elfrida laughed.

  “I lasted two point three sols. When I logged off, I couldn’t even speak to call for help. Had to do a week of full-gee rehab …” Dos Santos’s smile faded. “And months of therapy.”

  Elfrida shook her head. Her ordeal now seemed like a walk in the park by contrast. “Wow.”

  “Have a seat.” Dos Santos patted the couch beside her. Elfrida sat, although she’d just been sitting for thirty-six hours, and would rather have stayed on her feet to get her circulation pumping again. Thirty-six hours ago, dos Santos would never have invited her to sit beside her. This was a real breakthrough. Her hours on 11073 Galapagos had initiated her into a half-intuited inner circle of veterans.

  “So,” dos Santos said. “I know you must be tired, and we’ll do a formal debrief when you’ve had some sleep. But I did notice that you’d turned your assistant off.”

  Elfrida closed her eyes. The moment she did so, she wanted to sink into the ergoform sofa and sleep. She forced them open again. “Yes. I had to turn her off. Ma’am, they guessed. The minute I took my helmet off, they knew I wasn’t human.” What an odd sentence to utter! But that was how it had felt.

  “Oho. That’s very interesting. So what’s happening now? Is the assistant simulating you?” Dos Santos kept questioning Elfrida without waiting for answers. “Is she faking the signal latency? Is that going to work?”

  “Ma’am, I left her turned off. I told them I was shutting her down and I’d be back soon.” Elfrida cringed. She could feel dos Santos’s disapproval like a chill on her skin. “I had no choice! They’d have known if I left her in charge.” This was not the real reason she had shut Yumiko down. But she was too tired to make the truth look presentable, and she didn’t want to just blurt it out. “They might have done something awful to her if she tried to interact with them. They’re radically anti-AI.”

  “Default colonial attitude.” Dos Santos’s grin was tart. “There’s no place for even inhibited, override-enabled AI in their fragile little cultural bubbles.”

  “But most colonists can’t tell the difference.”

  “And these people could. I’ll write up a feedback memo for Procurement. What tipped them off?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to get them to explain, but all they would say was that it was obvious.”

  Dos Santos gazed into the distance, tapping her rolled-up tablet on her knee. A fine line came and went between her brows. She turned back to Elfrida. “Have you ever heard of the uncanny valley effect?” Anticipating Elfrida’s headshake, she unrolled her tablet.

  Dos Santos was an augment geek. She had EEG signaling crystals, a row of tiny skin-covered bumps like moles at her hairline, as well as transducers implanted in her ears. She also had a BCI—Brain-Computer Interface—in her skull. That plus the EEG crystals enabled her to telecast without the headset that implant virgins like Elfrida had to wear, and also to interface with the net, where a signal was available, and the various databases on the Botticelli Station server. Thus, she could talk to her tablet by subvocalizing or gaze-typing. The graph she called up now had a Media Archives watermark.

  “This is the so-called uncanny valley. It was actually identified by a Japanese psychologist.”

  “Tells you how old it is,” Elfrida joked brittly.

  “About three centuries old. No one talks about it anymore because it no longer applies. Our geminoid phavatars would fall into the valley, in Mori’s classification, right where it says ‘zombie.’ But we don’t react to them with revulsion and unease, because we’re so used to them. We’ve enlarged our mental category of ‘human’ to include realistic humanoid robots.” Dos Santos grinned. “People are flexible, who’d a thunk it?”

  “What’s a bunraku puppet?” Elfrida asked vaguely.

  “You’re pretty much out of it, aren’t you? Poor kid. I shouldn’t be keeping you talking.”

  “No—no. I want to talk. I need to talk.” That came out sounding so raw and needy that Elfrida winced.

  A housekeeping bot trundled in, bearing her grilled cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate on its tray, a welcome distraction. Less welcome was the blatant evidence of gluttony. Embarrassed for dos Santos to see her pigging out on comfort food, Elfrida complained, “I didn’t order two sandwiches. And what’s this spinachy stuff? I didn’t ask for that, either.”

  “I believe it’s spinach,” dos Santos said dryly. Addressing the bot, she said, “Well played, bud. The girl needs her vegetables.”

  The little bot tooted and rolled off. “It’s all just nutriblocks with flavorings and texturants, anyway,” Elfrida mumbled. She took an enormous bite.

  “I’m sure there are at least a few molecules of cheese and wheat in there somewhere.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Elfrida said indistinctly.

  “May I?” Dos Santos reached over and tore off a corner of Elfrida�
�s second sandwich. “Mmm. Takes me right back to … oh, basic training.”

  “Basic training?”

  “Yeah, you know, back in the Cretaceous Era. They really put us through it in those days. Military-style PT sessions followed by freefall acclimatization, with a hundred pages of Hist. Psych. to memorize before reveille. That’s where I learned about the uncanny valley. Anyway, we used to order piles of carbs to fuel our all-nighters. Sandwiches, pizza, shujiao, samosas … happy days!”

  Elfrida swallowed. She was flattered and excited by these easy confidences. It occurred to her that dos Santos might be trying precisely to put her at her ease, maybe even soften her up for something, but she dismissed the thought.

  “When I was in training, they limited our calories,” she recalled ruefully. “Something about developing an efficient metabolism. The joke was they were trying to make us lose weight so more of us could fit into a lifeboat, if we ever had to. I’ve been making up for it ever since.” She pinched her thigh, which was shamefully pudgy after six months on station.

  Dos Santos’s eyes shone with amusement. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said softly. “You’re a perfectly healthy young woman. Eat your sandwiches.”

  Elfrida’s heart thumped. Her appetite had vanished. She felt both elated and absurdly disappointed. She wanted to toss out a pitch-perfect, flirtatious comeback, but her brain was hazy with fatigue and Japanese. She tore off a crust and nibbled on it.

  “Sorry, Goto, I never got to the point regarding the uncanny valley hypothesis,” dos Santos said. “My guess is that your Galapajin are more sensitive than we are. They’re extremely isolated. This may well be the first time they’ve ever seen a high-end phavatar. Thus they detected nearly-imperceptible differences we simply overlook.”