2312

  Since he had been able to see the big rock foamers on the skyline from Vinmara, he had assumed that they could not be too far away. Now, as he walked over the crunchy and sometimes slippery snow downhill toward the dry ice sea, he realized that the new town’s hillside perch might give it a view much farther away than he had reckoned. In fact it could be many kilometers.

  This thought was beginning to oppress him when he came over a small ridge in the ice and saw a super-zamboni, not immediately near but just a couple of kilometers away, and lumbering along slowly in the usual manner. He broke into a trot and tried to pace himself for the run there. It was moving crossways to his approach, so he was going to be all right; no need to kill himself.

  Nevertheless he was huffing and puffing by the time he reached the thing. Unfortunately if there was a person or persons inside it, they were not looking out the cabin windows, which were up at the top and front of the thing. There was nothing for Kiran to do except jog next to it and jump up onto its side where a ladder came almost to the ground. Climb the ladder, get on the roof of the thing, which was not only railed, but full of instrumentation to hold on to. Alas it was a bit of exposure to hang over the front and try to reach down to where the windows started, and there was nothing much to hold on to. Seemed as if the windows were in fact still out of reach, which was frustrating.

  There was a hatch door, however, in the roof, and when he saw it he began to pound on it with his fists, then kick it with the heels of his boots. He was looking around to see if there was anything he could break off to hit the door with even harder when the behemoth shuddered to a halt, and soon after, he could hear voices below him, and the hatch door opened.

  “Thanks!” he shouted. “I got lost out here!”

  So two Venusians brought him inside, and he had a very difficult time making up a story for them that would explain his presence down there on the frozen ocean—it had to involve an admission of recreational drug use and even worse, geographical disorientation, so he squirmed his way through it, feeling lucky that embarrassment was the appropriate emotion for his cover story and its lame particulars. Happily the two minders listened to their translator saying it all in Chinese, and merely nodded as if they had often witnessed such foolishness before, and went back to their screen game. They were headed for a working camp under Ba’het Patera, they told him, and would be there in four hours. There was beer in the fridge if he was interested.

  The working camp they came to was one of a whole series of them, Kiran saw on the map, running west along the northern shore of the new ocean and sheltering the people who were getting the last of the CO2 sealed over. Kiran gave his original ID card to the people at the camp, but they only looked at it briefly and waved him over to the galley. He ate voraciously while he pored over the map on his tabletop screen. He had already seen that there were fast little snowmobiles out in the camp’s parking lot, and the map seemed to indicate that the camps dotting the shore were close enough together that a snowmobile could get from one to the next on one fuel load. Maybe that was even part of the plan.

  Very nice. And as they kept regular hours despite the perpetual night, he merely waited until everyone had gone to bed, and then went out to one of the snowmobiles, checked that it was full of fuel, fired it up, and took off west.

  These snowmobiles were neat little things, more like cars on skis than any of the monsters being used for the sequestration work. He had often enjoyed driving them in his first months on Venus, and now he sat back and gave the AI instructions and watched the eerie dim landscape slide by. The snow here had packed down to what they called firn, and his vehicle zipped right along. It would be an all-night drive, so to speak, but then he could come into the next camp when they were getting up. Maybe just drive into the parking lot and jump into another snowmobile and keep going, why not? No one cared about these vehicles on the ice; they were no one’s property. And there was nowhere to go in them.

  Or so he told himself as he fell asleep, and when he woke up and had the AI slide them into the parking lot of the next camp, it worked just as he had hoped. Out of that one, into another, off again; no one the slightest bit concerned. “I love Venus,” he told the AI pilot. His old translation belt said it in Chinese, although probably the vehicle’s AI understood English too. The old belt was a sad step down from the spectacles, but in this situation it didn’t really matter.

  Two more camps, two more snowmobiles, and he came to a camp he had spotted on the maps, one that had a train line spur that would take him up through the Ut Rupes and the Vesta Rupes and eventually to Colette. As he came into the camp he saw a train, at what passed here for a station, which was just a loading dock and a small building. As he slid up on the snowmobile he saw that they were loading some of the cars from a siding, under big lights. Being in the light of the lamps, they could see little outside that cone of illumination, so he crept up on them, staying in the dark, and in the moment when they were finishing their work he threw a rock at the building by the tracks, and when they went to investigate the bang, he hopped up into the car and ducked down behind the boxes inside. Not long after that he was closed into the car, and felt the train jerk forward with maglev smoothness and head up the long slope to Colette, far above him on the Lakshmi Planum, so ominously named.

  He had fallen sleep, and woken up starving, when the car doors finally opened up. He waited for a clear moment, jumped out of the car and hustled away from it. No one around. He wasn’t certain, but after he slipped out of the station he confirmed it: he was inside the dome of Colette. It was the third day since he had left Vinmara, and he felt a little spacy from hunger, but pleased as well.

  Now to find Shukra. He could return to his lodge, but that was where Lakshmi’s agent had always met him…. In the end he strolled through the big city streets, trying to look innocent, and went to the offices where he had first been taken by Swan to meet Shukra so long before. Since that first meeting Shukra had always come to him, so Kiran didn’t know where else to go. He had had a lot of time to think about this, but he still wasn’t quite sure of the best approach to take. There was the distinct possibility that he was throwing himself from the frying pan into the fire, but because Shukra had contacted him, and had told him what to look for, it seemed like it could be more like getting out of the fire back into the frying pan, or hopefully off the stove entirely. Anyway he didn’t see how he could avoid the risk of asking someone for help, and Shukra was his best bet. So he walked in the outer door of that first office, and went up to the security desk and said to the trio there, “I’m here to see Shukra, please. Please tell him that I have what he asked me for, and I want to give it to him.”

  SWAN AND KIRAN

  Taken in by what turned out to be an Interplan ship; cleaned up and fed; slept for twelve hours straight; up and eating again; and after that they were in Venus orbit, and then in a landing craft. The craft fell like a brick to the still-shaded planet, then eased off at the end to thump onto a runway. When they emerged in the big atrium of the spaceport, Swan could see that they had landed outside Colette. There was a view to a rumple of snowy muscular hills to the north, all dim under swirls of dark cloud. Venus!

  What had happened in raw space still bulked large in her mind, so that what stood before her eyes now was like a dream. She was separated from Wahram as they went through their medical checkups and then a long security postmortem. The people talking to her were upset; it was obviously necessary to attend to the moment, transparent though it was. Later she could mull over what had happened and what she felt about it. She did not want it to slip away like everything else.

  Their hosts brought her a little feast in dim sum style, with tiny plates and morsels of food, no more than a mouthful each, or just a taste, each with a different sauce, until her palate was completely confused, and she felt stuffed after four bites. Her stomach rebelled; it grumbled and queased throughout the conversation that began at the end of the meal.

  Many there were
drinking liquor and opioid mixers. Swan sipped soda water, watching people carefully. The Venusians there were looking very subdued. A leavening of jokesters, clustered mostly at one table, laughed at the gurneys of food, but the rest looked chastened, even grim. The salvation of the sunshield was all very well, of course, a great victory to be sure. But their defensive systems had failed them, and the danger inherent in the sunshield had been emphasized for all the world to see. Disaster had been staved off this time, but it still hung over them like a sword: a terrible fate, perpetually forestalled by a thing no stronger than a venetian blind, or a circular kite on a string.

  One particularly grim part of the room was absorbed in the problem of what had happened to the sunshield’s security; these people were poking at their tabletop’s graphs and talking rapidly to each other. It appeared most of them thought the failure to respond had been caused by an inside job. Wahram rolled into the room in a wheelchair and joined them, his left leg held straight out and swathed in white. He nodded slowly as they spoke to him. Once he glanced over at Swan, as if he had just heard something she would find interesting; then he was deep in it again. Swan would hear about it later, she hoped. Although then it occurred to her that he might feel he had to tell them about her telling Pauline about the group Alex had assembled when she had promised she wouldn’t. How else was the story of what had happened going to parse? Well, in the end her rash act had saved Venus. Not that that meant she wouldn’t suffer for it anyway. Be known as a completely untrustworthy reckless flibbertigibbet qubehead. It wouldn’t be that hard of a case to make.

  She sat watching the Venusians. They stayed slumped in their chairs, depressed. She asked some questions and they answered, except sometimes they didn’t.

  She came back to something they didn’t seem to want to address: “I suppose you have to stick with the sunshield, now that it’s there?”

  One waved a hand impatiently. “Some say no, that we should change.”

  “What do you mean? Wouldn’t that take spinning the planet up to some kind of day-night?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how?”

  “The only way there is,” one said. “A heavy meteor shower at a tangent.”

  “The very late heavy bombardment,” someone called from the jokesters’ table.

  “But wouldn’t that wreck the surface you have?” Swan said. “Blast away the foamed rock, the CO2, the atmosphere—everything you’ve done?”

  “Not everything,” the first one said. “We’d just keep hitting the same spot. Things would just be… disarranged.”

  “Disarranged!”

  “Look, we don’t like this idea. We’ve fought this idea of spinning it up. We all have.” Gesturing around the room at the others there. “But Lakshmi and her crowd have been arguing it could work without too much disruption. Just one more short deep ocean trench, and ejecta to the east of it. Other areas would suffer too, especially around the equator, but not so much that we would kill the bacteria we have out there now. And it wouldn’t release more than a couple percent of the buried CO2.”

  “But wouldn’t it take a few hundred years of heavy bombardment to get the spin you wanted?”

  “The idea would be to spin it to about a hundred-hour day. We think most Terran life-forms can tolerate that. So it would only take a hundred years.”

  “Only a hundred!”

  A new voice: “What these people are arguing is that we did it too fast the first time.” This particular speaker, an old person, eyes alive in a weathered face like a mask, sounded a little regretful, a little disgusted. “Did it too much like Mars! Took the way of the sunshield because it was fast! But once you have it, you have to keep it. You depend on it. And now people can see what could happen to it. So Lakshmi will win. The vote will go for bombardment now.”

  “In the Working Group, you mean?”

  “Yes. We’ll have to stay in shelters, or even retreat into sky cities, or even go back home for a while. Wait until things calm down again.”

  Wahram, who had rolled over and joined them, said, “But what will you bombard it with this time? You won’t be taking any moons and cutting them up.”

  “No,” the old one said. “That was part of the going too fast. But there are many Neptunian Trojans to be sent down.”

  “Aren’t the Tritons developing those?”

  “There are thousands of them. And they are all Kuiper belt captures. We could replace from the Kuiper belt, if the Tritons want. So nothing need be lost as far as Neptune is concerned. The Tritons already agree to the principle.”

  “Well,” Swan said, baffled. She didn’t know what to say. She regarded their faces, so grim and irritated. “Is it what the people here want? Can you tell?”

  They looked at each other. The first said, “There’s a network of cadre layers, like the panchayats in India. And everyone is talking. There’s only forty million of us here. So—the Working Group will hear from us and from everyone. But in fact the idea was already gaining traction. Now with this thing, people see the need. Lakshmi has won.”

  Later, when Swan was alone back in her room at the hospital, there was a tap at the door, and in came Shukra with Swan’s young friend from Earth, Kiran. She greeted them happily, immediately cheered by the sight of their faces, so vivid and real. Shukra, whom she had worked with a million years ago; Kiran, her newest friend—now they had the same look on their faces, serious and intent. They sat down by her bed and Swan poured them glasses of water.

  “Listen to the youth here,” Shukra said, tipping his head at Kiran.

  “What?” Swan said, alert to trouble.

  Kiran put a hand up as if to reassure her. “You told me when you brought me here that there were factions. That’s turned out to be true, and it’s even kind of a little underground civil war, you could almost call it.”

  “Lakshmi,” Shukra said heavily, as if this would explain everything. “He got involved with her.”

  “Is that bad?” Swan asked. “I mean—I’m the one who told him to try her.”

  Shukra rolled his eyes at this. “Swan, you were here a hundred years ago. You should know that things have changed since then. Tell her,” he said to Kiran.

  “I started moving stuff and carrying messages for Lakshmi,” Kiran said, “and Shukra saw that was happening, and got me to look closer into what I was seeing when I did things for her.”

  “He was bait,” Shukra said with a hard smile, “and she took it. But probably she knew he was bait.”

  Kiran nodded, with a look at Swan that seemed to say Look what you got me into here. He said, “There’s a new coastal town that Lakshmi’s team is developing, it’s definitely her place, and it’s set too low for some reason. People thought she might want it drowned later on for an insurance scam or something like that. Anyway, they’re doing something funny in that town. I think maybe they’re making androids or something. Robots made to look like humans, you know?”

  “I do know,” Swan said. “Tell me more.”

  “There’s an office there that was closed off, a pretty big building. I saw a box of eyeballs get delivered there. I think they might be putting together artificial people. Some kind of Frankenstein factory.”

  “You saw that?”

  “The guard I was with opened a box, and it was eyeballs. He didn’t like it that I saw, so I had to get to teacher Shukra here, and ask for help.”

  Shukra nodded as if to say this had been a smart move. Swan said to him, “So this place he was at is Lakshmi’s?”

  “Yes,” Shukra said. “Her work units built the whole town. So look—I don’t know anything about this Vinmara operation, but she’s got people coming into Cleopatra that we can’t ID. I set up an office in Cleopatra myself, it’s supposedly an open city, although really she calls the shots there. I was trying to figure out where these new people were coming from. But now—when I heard about the attack on the sunshield, the first thing I thought was, Well, isn’t that convenient for friend Laksh
mi. People will be scared into supporting the plan to spin up the planet, and if we do that, the new hole they’ll rip in the equator will shrink the reach of the ocean accordingly. These places like Vinmara, that are set too low? They won’t be set too low.”

  “Ahh,” Swan said. “Wow. But—what about the Chinese?”

  “The Chinese hate this second bombardment idea, and so if it happens anyway, despite their opposition, they lose leverage—again, all the better for Lakshmi. And in truth none of us want Beijing telling us what to do. So this also helps her in the argument.”

  “And so these humanoids she’s having built?” Swan leaned forward and clicked on the table screen. “Here—show me where this Vinmara is on a map. Let’s get Inspector Genette in here, and Wahram too. They’ll be very interested to hear what you have to say.”

  Inspector Genette arrived in her room, then Wahram, wheeling himself along in his wheelchair, his left leg swathed in its medwrap. They listened to Kiran’s story and then sat pondering the implications.

  Inspector Genette said, “I think we need to decide some things before we act on this. After what’s happened, I’m quite sure that I need to execute the plan we have been devising, which I have not yet described to you, Swan. So if you will agree to turn off Pauline again, I can tell it to you.”

  Swan wasn’t sure she wanted to go through that again, and the inspector must have known by now that she had told Pauline what had been said at the last off-the-record meeting, so she didn’t see the point.

  But in any case she was forestalled, because Wahram now said to Genette, “I’m afraid we should perhaps go through with the plan without Swan knowing about it at all. She may turn off Pauline for the conversation, but she may then tell her qube what happened after she turns it back on, as she did the last time we did this.”