Venus of Dreams (10 page)

Pavel shook his head. The Habbers were only consulting with the Project now, living among the Islanders as observers. It was necessary to tolerate them. Earth, whatever its resentments, depended on the Associated Habitats and their technical accomplishments more than the Mukhtars cared to grant openly, and the Project had to abide by the agreement that allowed a few Habbers on the Islands. But now Pavel wondered if the Project would have to turn to the Habbers for even more help when work on the surface settlements began. This possibility made him uneasy, but it was the Project's future that mattered more.

The Nomarchies were growing impatient. Each Island, floating in the atmosphere atop its giant helium cells, could support only the weight of about five thousand people and the objects that sustained them. The whole point of the Project had been to settle a planet, not to have permanent settlements around it, which was something the Habbers might have done. Earth wanted to see people housed in domes on the surface, claiming Venus, even if it meant that the early settlers would be almost as cut off from the planet around them as they would have been on an Island, and exposed to more danger as well.

Pavel was not pleased with Earth's impatience for surface settlements, but he had made his peace with it. Earth's politics and motives were matters to study and use for his own ends, not issues on which to take a stand that could jeopardize the Project. Earth had waited a long time. It needed an outlet for its restless and energetic souls, and a dream to soothe and challenge those left behind on the home world. Without Venus, a frustrated, bounded Earth might again turn on itself.

Pavel sighed, withdrawing from the hum of his Link. He had avoided thinking about the Linker whom Yukio had pressed him to see, and already knew what that man would tell him.

Some of the Islanders had grown careless, were spending too much free time in the company of Habbers, and that presented its own dangers to the Project. Working with a Habber was one thing; becoming too friendly was quite another. Unfortunately, people had to be reminded that their loyalty must be to the Nomarchies. If one grew too close to Habbers, one might begin to see the Project, and Earth itself, through their eyes. Questions could be raised, doubts could infect the Project, and the Habbers, with their talk of how their ancestors had escaped Earth, might even lure some to their worlds. Those working on the Project had to be warned, shown the consequences of too close an attachment to Habbers. A few would have to be reprimanded, perhaps even exiled from the Islands. Others would get the message, and the exiles would be more circumspect if they were ever allowed to return.

Pavel rubbed his chin. This was a task he did not welcome. He longed to let the matter pass; most Islanders cared too much about the Project to allow themselves to fall under the spell of the Habs. But he had to act now, while this potential problem could still be controlled. Only the Project's future mattered, the dream to which he had given his life; those who might stand in the way of its fulfillment would have to be chastened or disregarded. The cyberminds could select a few examples from those who had sought the company of Habbers a bit too often. The sooner he settled this, the sooner he could clear his mind and peruse the mathematical papers a scholar in Tbilisi had recently transmitted to him.

Pavel opened his Link and summoned Ari Isaacson, the Linker who had returned from Earth.

Six

A shuttle was decreasing its speed as it entered Venus's upper atmosphere; then it began to raise its rounded, stubby nose as it positioned itself for a landing on Island One. That Island was known to most as the Platform, or the Field, for it had no dome. It was on the Platform that shuttles returning from the Bats or from Anwara docked, where waiting airships ferried passengers back to the Islands.

The Platform seemed to float under the ship's tail; the Island's dark metal surface was studded with circles of light. The shuttle was returning from the northern Bat, one of the two large, winged satellites sunward of the planet's poles. Each Bat orbited the sun rather than Venus, thus maintaining a stable position; the wings of each Bat extended past the shadow of the Parasol in order to capture power from the sun.

Liang Chen had been working on the northern Bat for over two months; he had earned the period of rest he would now have on Island Two. Though he would have some work to do there, it never seemed like work after a shift on the Bat.

Straps held Chen in his seat; he kept his eyes on the seat in front of him and tensed as the ship dropped closer to the Platform. He wondered why anyone would want to pilot the craft, or be a pilot at all. An invisible weight pressed against his chest and he knew that the shuttle's retros were firing, slowing their descent toward the circle of light; the weight dissipated, and he knew that the craft had landed safely.

The floor under his feet had become a sloping wall. A slight hum filled the ship; Chen waited until a light on the panel above him signaled that the ship had been safely lowered into ifs dock and the dock sealed off above. His friend Fei-lin was already out of his seat, nimbly making his way down the jutting handholds on the sides of the seats. Chen shouldered his duffel and followed the other man, careful to keep his hands out of the way of the feet above him.

He went through the exit and climbed down a small ladder to the floor; he was standing inside the wide, cylindrical dock that held this shuttle. People were crowding through the dock's door; Chen pushed through after Fei-lin and entered a lighted tunnel, then climbed into one of the waiting cars that would carry the passengers to the airship bay.

Chen wedged himself into a seat next to Fei-lin, ignoring his talkative friend's chatter with the other workers. The car began to move, rolling past walls filled with graffiti in several languages. One passenger who could read howled with laughter as he read one inscription to the others; the inscription, apparently a recent one, concerned the personal habits of a particular Guardian commander who had visited the Platform not long before.

Chen settled back, resting his head against the car's dome. He had survived another shift on the northern Bat, where he had worked repairing the systems that supported its docks. The Bat was largely tiers of docks designed to service the automatic shuttles that traveled to and from the installation on the polar surface. That structure, like the other at the south pole, had been built in order to remove excess oxygen from Venus. Chambers in the structure drew in the atmosphere, separated the oxygen from other elements, and compressed it. Robots then ferried the oxygen in containers to the shuttles, which carried it up to the Bats where much of it was flung into space. The rest was used on the Bat itself, or ferried away for other purposes.

The oxygen-removal system was an automatic one, but people were needed on the Bats to service the steady stream of hundreds of shuttles, and they all lived with the fear that the volatile oxygen might explode. That had happened before, and the memorial pillars engraved with the names and images of the dead back on the Islands always reminded Chen of the danger he would face once more on his next shift inside the Northern Bat.

That danger, however, was not his greatest fear. He worried more about the polar installation below, about the possibility that a malfunction might occur and that the robots would not be able to handle it. He could be one of those sent down to the surface to deal with such a problem. He had never been sent down yet; though he could think calmly about being a settler during the decades to come, the thought of actually descending to the barren land below still frightened him. He hoped that his dream would be strong enough to overcome his fear, which he had never admitted to anyone; how foolish it would be to labor for a goal his own fear might keep him from reaching.

Fei-lin nudged him. "You look as if you're going
to
the Bat, instead of coming back."

Chen shook his head, unable to form a reply.

"Cheer up. We're almost home." The corridor suddenly widened as the car came to a stop at the entrance to the airship bay.

The dirigible floated toward Island Two. Its cabin had no windows, but a large screen near the front of the airship revealed the darkness outside.

This airship, like most of those used by the Project, had a small cabin with fifty seats covered by a worn, pale fabric, and the aisle was scarred by tiny dents and scuff marks. The two pilots in the front of the ship, bands around their heads, were concentrating on the panels before them, ignoring the talk of the passengers.

Chen sat near the back of the airship, listening to the swirl of conversation around him as he polished the small piece of wood he held in his hands. He had managed to finish the carving on the Bat; a friend had salvaged the wood for him from a dead tree on Island Two destined for the recycler. The face he had carved in the wood stared up at him sightlessly; it was the thin face of a man whose eyes seemed to look inward instead of out at the world.

Fei-lin was entertaining some of the other passengers with a story, moving his hands as words flowed easily from his lips. Chen envied the small man his fluid speech; Fei-lin could make words sing and dance. Chen, with his own speech, chipped at stone, each word struggling to force a chink through the wall around him; even in his boyhood tongue, he had never been able to remove the barrier. The wall only vanished when he listened to others and let their words flow into his thoughts; the wall reappeared whenever he tried to express his own.

On the screen, through the darkness illuminated only by the lights on the outside of the airship, he saw a faint gleam in the murkiness. Chen was going home. He thought of Island Two as his home now. He had been with the Project for four years, ever since he had turned seventeen. He could hardly believe that he had once feared coming here. His poor way with words had saved him; he had been unable to form any coherent objections to his Counselor's suggestion that he apply for the Project.

Island Two was the only real home he had ever known. In spite of what the Nomarchies had been able to do for his region of Earth, there had been too many children in his village, too many people in the cities nearest it, and not enough work for them all. His people tilled the land and were grateful when they raised enough to feed themselves without having to prevail on their Counselor for more aid.

Only a few had been able to escape the village, and Chen had been among the fortunate ones. He had been taken from his family at the age of nine and sent with other children to be an apprentice mechanic in Shanghai, and he had been glad to go. Children's allotments for his town had been cut in half by then, making him useless to his parents, who had been promised more credit if they gave him up. They were practical people; one son would not be missed when they had two others, and Chen had been more useless than most, spending his days whittling and carving. The pastime his parents had mocked had rescued him from them. Chen had given a carved wooden boat to the Counselor during one of that man's visits to the village, and the man had remembered the gift when it was time to select a few apprentices.

Chen had never missed the father who had beaten him whenever he couldn't find words to answer the man's barked questions, or the mother who had hissed angrily or sighed in exasperation. But the couple had not entirely lacked the strong sense of family common in their town. They had wailed and wept when he left them, though they had been careful not to protest against the Counselor's plans for him.

In Shanghai, he had lived in a dormitory with others like himself. He had learned how to avoid the bullies, how to use his fists and feet when necessary, how to alter a few circuits in the dispenser so that he could get more than the allotted rations, and how to sneak into the girls' dormitory at night without being seen by the sensors.

Along with the skills that would make them useful Earth citizens, the apprentices had also been taught Anglaic, the official tongue of the Nomarchies, the remaining legacy of an old and once-dominant culture, and the language the children would need if they were ever sent outside their own land. There had been no need to teach them the formal Arabic still popular among the Mukhtars, for when were they likely to encounter anyone so grand?

The Anglaic words had entered Chen's head easily enough with the aid of his band and hypnotraining, and he had not needed to master their written symbols. He had imagined that the new language would finally free his tongue of its clumsiness. He had finally realized that he would be awkward in the second language too.

Fei-lin had finished his story; the passengers nearest to him seemed to be waiting for more. The small man glanced at Chen, then began another tale of a boyhood prank he had pulled on a Counselor. Chen had heard the story before, and suspected it wasn't true; Fei-lin always added new details each time he told it. Chen kept his face still, used to looking as though he were listening while following his own train of thought. He had always had friends who were talkers—a boy named Li at the dormitory in Shanghai, another boy named Benzi when Chen had first worked in space. He had been grateful to them for filling the silence, while they had appreciated having a listener. Fei-lin was slender, while Benzi had been stocky, but something in Fei-lin's manner now reminded Chen of the old friend he had met in Earth orbit.

At the age of thirteen, Chen had been sent to a space station. The orbiting platform was an old one; he and the others with him spent their work time repairing old, salvaged satellites and some of their free time tinkering with the platform's ancient circuitry. They were afraid to complain about-the wretched conditions there, about the tiny, crowded rooms, the nearly constant problems with plumbing, and the faulty homeostat that filled the air with the smell of rotting vegetation; too many people were available to replace them. Benzi had claimed that children were sent to work in such places because the Nomarchies could afford the loss of a child more easily than that of an experienced worker.