Quiet Invasion (41 page)

But Venera wouldn’t be alone. Ben straightened up, one muscle at a time. Venera had neighbors. Neighbors who could fly from world to world as easily as a yewner bureaucrat could fly from republic to republic. More easily.

What if the Venerans set up one of their portals between Venus and Mars? Between Luna and Venus? The colonists could move between the worlds without any interference from Mother Earth. Earth’s transport and communications monopolies would be shattered. The one sure control they held over the colonies would be gone.

If Venera could make a deal with the aliens. If it were Venera that spoke, not the U.N.

If it were Venera that spoke.

Venera, meaning Helen. Ben stared out at the clouds. Helen would never abandon the U.N. To do so would mean abandoning Yan Su, who had stood by her for so long.

No.
He corrected his thoughts.
Helen would never betray the U.N. unless the U.N. betrayed her, betrayed Venera, first.

If that happened, all bets were off. Helen would do anything she had to so that Venera would survive and be free to do its work with its people free to live their lives. She’d even make a deal with aliens.

An idea formed in his mind, one slow thought trickling into his consciousness at a time.

There was a way. He held it in his hands. He stood a very good chance of pushing Helen over the edge. All he had to do was lie to the U.N. about what she knew and when she knew it.

Ben leaned back in the chair as far as it would let him and scrubbed his face with both hands.

All he had to do was be the one who really betrayed Helen.

He’d been on Luna when he met Helen. He’d successfully left the name Paul Mabrey behind and found work as a geologist for Dorson Mines, Inc. As such, he supervised more databases than humans, analyzing rock and soil samples and looking for useful deposits. It was a job. It bought food and shelter and paid the taxes so he could breathe and drink, but it meant nothing.

He’d been in one of the public caverns. He’d just bought coffee and fry cakes for breakfast. He’d been sitting on a hard little chair, staring at the walls and thinking how much he missed the Bradbury gardens. The Lunars had covered their gray rock with vines. Morning glories and wild grapes made a living wallpaper and warred with the rambler roses and raspberries in providing color and scent. Pretty, but not the gardens. Empty, second-rate. Cheap. Like his job. Like him.

“Dr. Godwin?”

He looked up. A woman stood by his table, plainly dressed in a blue blouse and matching trousers. Her graying hair was bundled into a knot and pinned in place with wooden pins. Her eyes sparkled and her entire attitude said she knew why she was alive.

“Yes?” said Ben, wracking his brain to see if he should know her.

“I’m Helen Failia. I’ve been looking for you. I need a geologist who knows comparative planetology and volcanology.” She dropped into a spare chair without asking. “For Venera Base on Venus.”

“Oh?” was all Ben could think to say. Venera was half-built, half-occupied, and some said half-baked. It was a pure-research colony, the first in decades. No one believed it could last. The science currents predicted its death year after year. But somehow, Venera never quite laid down.

“Our staff is thinning out. We need to get some fresh blood in. Someone who can dig hard into the work.” Which told him why her staff was thinning out. She didn’t have the money to pay them what the mining companies could. Which also explained why she was willing to recruit someone who only had a few, very obscure papers to his credit. Papers he’d spent the past three or so Terran years carefully salting through the stream. Helen, he would learn, always had an eye open for a good bargain. “I’ve read your credentials. Your postdoctoral work is brilliant. You’ve got an eye for the unusual, and you don’t mind hard work. Which is perfect for Venus.” She didn’t just smile; she beamed. Ben couldn’t help thinking of Ted Fuller. On a good day, when things were going well, Ted radiated the same light.

Ben drank his bitter, cooling coffee, trying to sort out his thoughts. This was definitely not what he’d been expecting to hear this morning. He’d been expecting another day of trying to convince himself he’d made the right decision, that this life really was better than the one he’d abandoned, or would be very soon.

“Venus is open territory,” said Helen, leaning on her elbows. “You can’t throw a stone without hitting something new. You’ll have complete freedom to direct the research. Anything you want to look at, it’s yours.”

Risky. It had the chance to bring him to public attention, and public attention could be the end of the line for someone hiding behind an alias.

He looked at the coffee in his cup. He looked at the vines covering the gray walls. He looked at the people around the table—miners, students, engineers, all buzzing about in their separate lives like bees and meaning about as much to him. He looked back at Helen, and in her dark eyes, he suddenly saw some hope. Hope of a real life, a better life, one with meaning and purpose to replace the purpose that had been ripped from him by the yewners and their troops.

“I’d have to hear about the base,” he said slowly. “The facilities, the package you’re offering, and so on.”

“Of course.” Helen picked up his coffee cup, sniffed its contents, and made a face. “But first you have to get some real coffee. On me. Come on.”

He’d followed her without question. Into the Lunar coffee bar, down to Earth, out to Venus. He’d followed her for twenty years through funding fights, mission fights, personnel fights, and charter fights.

Ben swiveled his chair and watched the clouds outside the window. They swirled and flowed together like his thoughts. They had predictable currents, he knew, and if you worked long enough, you could map their movements and understand how each little particle fit into the greater flow.

He’d never even tried to tell Helen about what had really happened to him all those years ago. Helen would not have understood that what they were doing on Mars was real, even more real than the research, or building Venera into a sustainable colony that would outlive both of them. What really mattered was shaking off Earth’s grip. What mattered was freedom. Right now, Mother Earth could tell them to do anything, anything, and they’d have to do it. They had no choice. Mother Earth owned them, their lives, and their homes. Helen never saw it that way. Helen thought she called the shots. Helen thought she was in control.

She wasn’t. Mother Earth was bigger, more forceful, and more determined than even Helen Failia.

Ben turned back around to face his desk again and started typing.

Helen had to be shown the truth.

“Good luck, Ambassador D’seun,” said K’est as D’seun glided through its windward gate. “Ambassador Z’eth is in the public park. She asks that you meet her there.”

“Thank you, K’est.” D’seun flew swiftly toward the park. He struggled to keep his senses open to the dying city—the bare bones, the air rich with forced nutrients, yes, but also filled with desperation. A thin veneer of life was all that lay between K’est and true death, and all the citizens knew it.

This is what I fight for,
he told himself.
We must prevent any more living deaths like these.

D’seun’s first impression of the public park was that it was bigger than his whole birth village had ever been. Bone, shell, ligament, vine, and tapestry outlined a roughly spherical labyrinth of arches, corridors, and pass-throughs. Flight became a dance, here. Wind became song, and the voice of the city guided him through it all.

“What am I interrupting here?” asked D’seun as he gave himself up to the drafts of the wind-guides and let them carry him through a corridor of story tapestries.

“Ambassador Z’eth has called a hiring fair,” replied K’est.

D’seun dipped his muzzle. Such things had been rare once, but with the massive numbers of refugees and indentures that circled the world, the ones who held the promises were gathering more and more frequently to review the skills they held promise to, and to exchange those skills and the persons to better serve the cities and the free citizens.

Conversations touched D’seun at every turn, about medicines, about refugee projections, and the health of the canopy. Adults and children, both free and with the hatchmark of indenture between their eyes, passed him on every side. Tentacled constructors and spindly, broad-eyed clerkers trailed in their wakes.

Finally, the wind-guides opened out into a pearlescent chamber that could have easily held two or three hundred adult females. The voices of a quartet rang pleasantly off its walls. Here and there, clusters of ambassadors and speakers hovered, deep in conversation with each other. The archivers hovered in their own clusters, off to the side, waiting until they were needed.

Z’eth herself was easy to spot. She drifted from cluster to cluster. She’d listen to a conversation for a moment and then move on to the next. D’seun could not feel any words from her. She just listened.

Good. Perhaps she’ll just listen to me.

Perhaps the city spoke to Z’eth, or perhaps she was just waiting for him, because as he flew through the portal, Z’eth lifted her muzzle and rose above the conversation where she hovered. D’seun flew quickly to her, deflating just enough to make sure his eyes were below hers.

“Good luck, Ambassador Z’eth,” he said as they touched hands. “Thank you for agreeing to see me. Please accept a guesting gift, which I found on my journeys.” As he spoke the formal words, he held out a palm-sized eyepiece. It lifted from his palm and hovered between himself and Z’eth. Inside, a delicate, biped drawn in shades of red raised her hand in greeting.

“Lovely!” exclaimed Z’eth. “One of your New People, is it not?”

“It is, Ambassador.” He did not even attempt to pronounce the name they called themselves by. “They are what I have come to speak with you about.”

Z’eth lifted herself and closed her right forehand around the eyepiece. “The members of the High Law Meet speak of nothing else. Their cogent method of contact with Ambassador T’sha has convinced many that they are a whole, sane people and should be treated as such.”

“I wish to urge you, Ambassador Z’eth, to believe no reports from Ambassador T’sha and her followers.” D’seun spoke earnestly, but softly. The touch of his words was for Z’edi only. “I see the tapestries they weave to show the New People as whole beings, complete in intellect and soul who live intricate lives and wish to exist with us in community.” He swelled as far as he dared. “This is not true. They do not know even the first principles of life. Community with them is impossible.”

Z’eth’s crest ruffled and spread. She touched her muzzle to his, and D’seun felt all her gentle mockery. “You are so certain, Ambassador, you must have been paying close attention to them.”

“Very close, Ambassador.” What did it matter what she knew? Either he would succeed, in which case she would be with him, or he would fail. If he failed, nothing else mattered. New Home and Home would both be lost.

“Your attention has been closer, I think, than your commission allowed, and for much longer,” Z’eth went on.

“Yes,” agreed D’seun. He had been supposed to supervise the seeding of the world and leave. He had left, but when he had returned for a monitoring stint, he had left behind some special tools. Each monitoring stint after that had brought him new data. He had all but mortgaged his future for the analysis of it.

“And you have shared none of this illicit information with the Law Meet?” Z’eth inquired. “How discreet of you. Why have you kept this to yourself?”

“At first, I feared T’sha and those like her would fear the New People.” He aimed his words right at Z’eth, not wanting her to miss a single one. “So I kept what I knew a secret until I knew how the New People could be controlled or eliminated.” Preferably eliminated. New Home had to be kept pure for life the People created and understood. “But, instead, she has fallen in love with them and their dead things.”

“Are you so sure they need to be controlled?” For the first time, the mockery left Z’eth’s voice. “Why not let them flourish beside us?”

Revulsion crawled across D’seun’s skin. “You do not know, Ambassador. They surround themselves with death. They bring nothing living with them. Their homes are dead, their shells are dead, even their tools are dead. They are ghouls, Ambassador, billions of ghouls who live in ignorance of even the basic ideas of spreading life. Can we permit ghouls to wander the winds of New Home with our children?”

Z’eth pulled her muzzle back in thoughtful silence. D’seun held himself still, trying to muster the patience to wait out her thoughts. He could not rush her. She had influence that went beyond wealth. If he could turn her from her patronage of T’sha, T’sha would be toppled. Everything depended on this.

“Ambassador, I seek a promise from you.”

“I assumed.” Her crest spread out even further, as if it reached toward every conversation and promise being exchanged in her dying city. “And what would you pay for this promise?”

“My children, when they are born, will belong to your city on New Home,” said D’seun. “They will serve your city until they are adults.”

It hurt to say it. It hurt to know that it had to be this way. He had been indentured in his tenth year of life, when K’taith succumbed to one of the first of the new rots. He had always sworn to the souls of his unborn children that they would grow to adulthood free.

But he had to break that oath. He had nothing left to promise but those children, whoever they were and whenever they would come to be. He could not permit the New People to spread their death further across New Home.

“A rich promise, and a risky one,” Z’eth mused. “You may not find a wife willing to go along with it.”

“I will find a wife who will,” said D’seun, firmly. He had to.

“You sound most determined.” Z’eth dipped her muzzle. “What promise do you want?”

“You will be elected to the Law Meet of New Home.” D’seun drifted as close to her as he could without touching her. “There is no question of this. I have heard the proposed rosters in the Meet. Your name is on every one. You will be the most senior of the ambassadors, the leader there as you are the leader here. I ask that you promise to follow my lead when we must determine the final disposition of the New People.”