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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (30 page)

BOOK: Venus
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“Frozen?”
“We were going to have a family,” Fuchs said, his voice low, his eyes looking into the past. “As soon as I got my mining company up and running, we were going to have children.”
“But why freeze the embryos?” I demanded.
“Zygotes,” he corrected. “They weren’t embryos yet, merely fertilized eggs that hadn’t begun to divide.”
“Why go to all the trouble—”
“Because I had to spend so much time in space,” he explained. “We wanted to avoid the risk of radiation damage to my DNA.”
“But then she married my father.”
“To save me.”
“She married him.”
“But she never had a child by him,” Fuchs said. “I don’t
know why. Maybe he’d gone sterile. Maybe she wouldn’t sleep with him once she found out that instead of killing me he destroyed me financially.”
Marguerite said, “She had herself implanted with a fertilized egg and you were the baby she bore.” Nodding toward Fuchs, she added, “His son.”
“How did you know I’m your son?” I insisted.
“I didn’t. Not until Marguerite started looking for a way to produce the enzymes you need. She ran DNA scans on both of us.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
Marguerite glared at me. “Do you want me to show you the DNA scans? Why do you think his blood type is compatible with yours?”
“But—she waited six years?”
“I don’t know why she did it or why she waited,” Fuchs said. “She was heavily into drugs by then, I know that much. Living with your father turned her into an addict.”
I had no reply to that.
With another groaning sigh, he went on, “Anyway, she got one of the fertilized ova and had herself implanted. He must have realized it wasn’t his child as soon as he found out that she was pregnant … .”
“And he killed her,” I said.
“She died in childbirth, didn’t she?” Marguerite asked.
“He probably tried to kill you both,” Fuchs said.
“He’s always hated me,” I said, in a whisper.
Marguerite added, “Your anemia came from her blood, while she was carrying you.”
“He’s always hated me,” I repeated, feeling empty inside, hollow. “Now I know why.”
“Now you know it all,” Fuchs said.
I looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. I was about his height, although my build was much lighter, much slimmer than his. My face was nothing like his, probably much more like my mother’s. But his ice-blue eyes were not far from the shade of my own.
My father. My biological sire. Martin Humphries was
not my begetter, he was only my caretaker, the man who had wanted me dead, the man who belittled and scorned me all my life.
“Do you really think he killed my brother?” I wondered aloud.
Fuchs sank back down on the bed, as if all this had suddenly become too much for him to bear.
“Do you think he killed Alex?” I repeated, raising my voice.
“You’ll find out when you’re down on the surface, going through his ship’s wreckage,” Fuchs said. “You’ll either get your answer there, or you’ll never know.”
I
left Fuchs’s quarters like a sleepwalker and stumbled down to the virtual reality chamber, to start my hurried training for piloting
Hecate
.
My mind was spinning. Fuchs was my biological father? My mother had loved him so much that she bore his baby even though she was married to Martin Humphries? Yes, I realized, that would be entirely possible. Probable, even. She didn’t want a child by Martin Humphries, that was clear. For six years she lived with him, allowed him to shame her with his womanizing, make a mockery of their marriage. Talk about trophy wives! My mother was his prize, the living symbol of his victory over Lars Fuchs. Her life must have been a pit of hell.
And here was Fuchs, my biological father, dying of the stresses that drove him. Obviously he wanted his revenge on my foster father, and just as obviously for all the years of my life he knew there was no way he could touch Martin Humphries, no way he could make Humphries suffer as he himself had suffered, no way he could make Martin
Humphries pay for the death of my mother, the woman he loved, the woman who sacrificed her life to save his.
Until this idiotic Venus prize. Once Fuchs heard that Martin Humphries was offering that ten-billion-dollar prize he recognized his chance to score at least a little of the vengeance he had nursed for more than a quarter of a century.
As I slowly pulled on the protective suit that I was to wear in
Hecate
, I went over and over what little I knew about my own origins, wondering who and what I could believe.
Why did she do it? Why did my mother flaunt her love for Fuchs after six years of marriage to my … to Martin Humphries? She must have known how it would enrage him. Perhaps that was why she did it; to hurt him, to strike back at him, to humiliate him in the only way she could.
And he killed her. Did she know he’d go that far? Did she care? She must have protected me, somehow. Must have seen to it that I was safe from his malice, from his hatred.
Yes, she made certain I was physically safe even though she couldn’t protect her own life. Or perhaps she didn’t care about herself. Perhaps his killing her was a release for her, an end to the pain that had filled her life.
Yet Martin Humphries did not kill me. I was probably cared for by people my mother had chosen. Or, more ironic still, probably it was my terrible physical condition that saved my life. For my first few months I was maintained in . a special medical facility while my various birth ailments kept me hovering on the brink of death. Perhaps Martin Humphries figured that I would die of my own accord; he wouldn’t have to bother with me, after all.
But I survived. I lived. How that must have tormented him! Me, the constant reminder that no matter how wealthy he was, no matter whom he could buy or sell, whom he could destroy financially or murder outright, I had survived. Me, the weakling, the Runt, the child sired by the one man in the solar system that he hated the most, I lived under his own roof.
He made my life as hellish as he dared. Did Alex know the entire story? Was Alex standing between me and my foster father’s murderous wrath? When Alex had his shouting match with his father, just before he left for Venus, was the fight about politics—or about me?
There was only one way for me to find out; only one person in the entire solar system knew what had really happened. Martin Humphries. I had to face him, confront him, get the truth out of him. And to do that, I had to survive this journey to the surface of Venus. I had to go through hell to get back to learn the facts of my own existence.
“Are you asleep down there?” Fuchs’s acrimonious voice snarled in my earphones.
That snapped my attention to the job at hand. He must be back on the bridge, I told myself, back in command. Until his next stroke.
“I’m suited up and entering the VR chamber,” I said into my helmet mike.
“Okay,” he replied. “The
Hecate
simulation is ready whenever you are.”
“Good,” I muttered as I clomped to the hatch that opened into the virtual reality chamber.
The special protective suit included most of the features of a regular spacesuit, of course, although to me it looked more like the cumbersome rigs worn by deep-sea divers in those ancient days before the invention of scuba gear. Heavy metal helmet with a tiny faceplate, bulky armored torso, arms and legs of thick cermet, boots that felt as if they weighed a ton apiece. The entire suit was honeycombed with tubing that circulated coolant, of course. Actually the tubes carried a true refrigerant and the backpack that I would have to wear included a miniaturized version of the type of cryostat used in physics labs to liquify gases such as hydrogen and helium.
So I shambled through the hatch like some old video monster, the servomotors on the suit whining and wheezing away with every plodding step I took. Without the servos
I’d never have had the muscular strength to move my arms and legs.
The VR chamber was a blank-walled compartment. One of the crew had put in a bunk, which would serve as a crude simulation for the couch in
Hecate
’s cockpit. The virtual reality stereo goggles were resting on the bunk, together with a set of data gloves and slippers. It took me several minutes to open the faceplate of my helmet and hook the goggles over the bridge of my nose, even longer to worm on the gloves and work the slippers over my clumsy boots. Fuchs grumbled impatiently every moment of the time.
“The way you’re going at it, it’d be easier on my blood pressure for me to pilot
Hecate
myself,” he complained.
That was the first time I’d ever heard him mention his blood pressure in front of the crew. He must have been truly disturbed by my slowness.
“I’m getting onto the couch now,” I said, once I had closed the faceplate again.
“About time,” he muttered.
Once I was stretched out prone on the couch my vision suddenly began to swirl giddily, flashes of color flicking on and off. For an instant I thought this was some new symptom of my anemia, but then the flashing ended as abruptly as it had started and I was looking at
Hecate
’s control panel. The virtual reality simulation had kicked in; my goggles were showing what I’d see when I actually was piloting the little ship.
Above the panel I saw the strewn wreckage of
Phosphoros
, torn and twisted sections of the ship’s metallic hull. A computer-graphics illusion, I knew, generated for the VR program. But it looked very real to me, fully three-dimensional.
My imaginary
Hecate
was hovering three kilometers above the illusory wreckage of
Phosphoros
, so my virtual instruments told me. I could see nothing inside the wreck, because we had no idea of what to expect in there. My task was to learn how to bring
Hecate
smoothly down to the
wreckage, search its interior for any sign of Alex’s remains, and then get safely back to
Lucifer
again.
The ship’s controls were simple enough. The computer did most of the work. I merely ran my gloved fingertips over the touchpads in the control panel and the ship responded almost instantly. Whoever had designed the control system had done an admirable job; it all worked intuitively. Right hand controlled pitch and yaw, left hand controlled roll. When you wanted to go left you moved your right index finger leftward along the touchpad. When you wanted to pitch the nose down, you slid your forefinger down the pad. The right foot pedal controlled the thrusters at the ship’s tail; the left pedal worked her fins, which pivoted like the diving planes of a submarine.
Simple. But not easy.
I won’t tell you how poorly I did, at first. My clumsy attempts at piloting had Fuchs swearing and me sweating.
“You’re overcorrecting,” he would shout into my earphones.
Or, “Too steep! You’re coming in too steep!”
It took more than a dozen tries before he was satisfied enough to let me descend down to the wreckage. Then I practiced working the waldoes, the glovelike implements that controlled the manipulator hands outside the hull. Again, it was simplicity itself in principle. Whatever motions your fingers made were reproduced faithfully by the mechanical hands outside. Again, it was devilishly difficult in practice to get the feel of those manipulators, to learn how to work them deftly enough to pick up a scrap of twisted metal or a piece of shattered equipment.
By the time Fuchs finally agreed to end the VR session I was soaked with perspiration and gasping for breath.
“Meet me in the sick bay,” he said as I wearily picked myself up from the bunk that had served as the virtual Hecate’s couch.
Nodon came to the VR chamber to help me out of the heat suit. A good thing, too. I don’t think I could have done much more than lift the heavy metal helmet off my head.
“How long was I in there?” I asked, panting, as he tugged the suit’s heavy torso up and over my head.
“One full watch, almost,” he said.
Nearly eight hours. No wonder I was exhausted.
A sly grin cracked his thin, almost fleshless face. “Captain said you did very well,” he confided.
“He did?”
“Oh yes. He said you didn’t wreck the ship once. Almost! But no wreck.”
Faint praise from Fuchs was like a Nobel Prize from anyone else, I thought.
“He also said not to tell you,” Nodon added, his smile turning into a boyish grin.
 
Marguerite was in the sick bay with Fuchs when I got there.
“I don’t think we should go through with this transfusion,” she said. “You’ve just suffered a serious stroke and—”
“And he’s not going out in
Hecate
with his damned anemia gnawing at him,” Fuchs snapped. He was sitting on the narrow examination table, Marguerite standing beside him.
“But your condition …” Marguerite objected.
He made a grisly smile for her. “Your ministrations have worked wonders. I’m fine.”
She could be just as stubborn as her mother, though. Marguerite insisted on doing a scan of Fuchs’s brain before proceeding with the transfusion. I stood in the hatch of the crowded sick bay, feeling tired and weaker every second, while she made him lie down, fixed the scanner to his head, and ran off a reading.
Watching him lying there, his eyes closed while the scanner buzzed softly, I realized anew that this man was my father. It was hard to accept that, even though I knew it was true. I mean, it’s one thing to know something is true intellectually, up in the front of your brain. But to
feel
it, to accept it down in your guts, that’s something else entirely.
He’s my father, I said silently to myself over and over
again. This man who can be so brutal at one moment and then quote poetry a moment later, this bundle of contradictions, this wounded snarling animal is my father. I’m made from his genes.
I believed it, but still I had no real feeling for Fuchs—except a grudging respect and a healthy amount of outright fear.
The scanner stopped its buzzing. Marguerite removed it from Fuchs’s head while the main display screen on the bulkhead began building up a three-dimensional view of his brain. We all peered at the image intently, even though I really didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for.
“See?” Fuchs said, sitting up again as he pointed to the false-color image of his own brain. “No permanent damage.”
The image looked like a normal brain to me; all of it tinged a sort of bluish gray. No alarming areas of red, which I presumed was the color that would be used to show damage.
“New blood vessels are developing,” Marguerite said, cautiously. “But the area where the blockage occurred isn’t fully repaired yet.”
With an impatient shake of his head, Fuchs said, “It’s too small to matter. I feel fine. Take a liter of my blood and my pressure will go down to normal.”
“A liter!” Marguerite’s eyes flashed wide. “Not even half that much.”
Fuchs chuckled. He had been joking, I realized. He had a strange sense of humor, dealing with people’s lives, including his own.
Rolling up his sleeve and lying back down on the table, he growled, “Come on, get it over with.”
I sat in the chair Marguerite had jammed in next to the table and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand to watch anyone get a needle jabbed into his flesh, especially me.
 
I went back to my bunk in the crew’s quarters and slept very soundly. If I dreamed, I don’t remember it. When I awoke, I felt strong, refreshed.
Then I realized that in a few hours I would be donning that heavy heat suit again and crawling into the real cockpit of the actual
Hecate
.
I would be going down to the surface of Venus, the first live human being to do so. Me! Alone down there where the rocks are red-hot and the air is so thick it can crush a spacecraft into crumpled wreckage.
To my surprise, I wasn’t terrified. Oh, there were butterflies in my stomach, true enough. I didn’t feel like one of those ultracool adventurers you see on video. I fully realized that there was a fine chance that I’d die out there, beside my brother.
BOOK: Venus
7.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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