Venus of Dreams (6 page)

"It is. It was." He smiled. "Bihar—that was my home."

"Iris knows how to read," Laiza burst out, then nearly collapsed in a fit of more giggling. Iris wanted to scream at her to be quiet.

"Do you really?" Jawaharlal's smile widened.

Iris nodded reluctantly. "I've been taking lessons, just a few. Prep lessons." Jawaharlal lifted his dark brows. "Oh, I know I don't need them, but—well, if I know some things, it might—" She felt flustered. "It might help me be a better farmer someday," she finished, wanting to show that she knew her place.

"Perhaps it will." Jawaharlal peered at her more intently. "You say that your name is Iris Angharads?"

"Yes."

The man's eyes went blank and his implanted jewel glowed; Iris was sure that he was communicating with the cyberminds through his Link. The blank gaze frightened her. A record of her progress in her lessons had to exist somewhere, and any Linker could probably call it up. Why did Laiza have to tell him? She couldn't bear a Linker's mockery; he might even tell her to end her studies.

Jawaharlal shook his head; his dark eyes were focusing on her again. "You should continue," he murmured.

Iris's mouth dropped open; had he really said that?

"Continue, child. It appears you're doing well at them. Don't be discouraged. I know only too well how easily one can be deflected from one's chosen course."

The man had praised her. She was still, unable to move.

"I must get back to the airship," he went on. "Farewell, Iris and Laiza." The dark-haired girl started at the mention of her name.

Iris lifted her head. "Good-bye, Linked One," she said courteously.

Jawaharlal began to walk back in the direction of the cradle. Iris realized that several people were now staring at her from across the square, probably wondering what she had dared to say to a Linker. Eric was making a face; he would tell her whole household about the incident.

Laiza suddenly howled with laughter. "It appears you're doing well," she said, mimicking Jawaharlal's slight accent. "Oooh, Iris. You'll be the smartest girl in town." Laiza jabbed her with an elbow.

"Stop it," Iris muttered.

"Oooh. Wait until they hear about this." Laiza raced off, clearly wanting to spread the news immediately.

Iris lay on her bed. She had gulped her supper, and her stomach, heavy with Winnie's chocolate and a hastily eaten meal, was beginning to hurt. Laiza had told all of the children in the store about the Linker; Iris could still hear their jeers. Tommy had insisted that the Linker was making a joke; Daria had said that Iris would soon be too smart for her company. Iris had somehow kept her wits, forcing herself to spend the rest of the afternoon playing a silly game of Jumpers with her friends instead of studying as she had planned, knowing what the other children would say if she went home early.

Supper had been almost as bad. Eric, who hadn't teased her in almost a month, had started in again while the women made
O
's with their mouths; Julia had finally silenced their chatter with an icy stare. Iris had not been able to look across the table at her father, where Constance hovered over Tad's chair as if she had never seen a man before.

I don't care, Iris told herself. Jawaharlal had told her to keep studying. A Linker had said she was doing well. He would have known if she were not, and had no reason to lie to her. She would show them all somehow.

Her door suddenly opened; Tad was standing in the hall. She sat up. "Can't you knock?" she cried out.

He entered the room. "Can I come in?"

"You're already in." She glared at her father, wishing he would go away. He walked over to her screen and picked up her band.

"So you're taking lessons, kid."

"Don't call me kid. My name's Iris, in case you forgot."

"You don't have to get snotty with me." He put the band down on the table. "It isn't such a bad thing, you know—learning."

She crawled to the edge of the bed. He sat down next to her. "I don't think it's so bad," Tad continued. "You might pick up something useful." The young man rubbed his chin. "Who knows?"

"You don't think it's silly?" Iris asked, surprised.

"No. Look, I've seen other places besides this hole. Linkers don't go around handing out compliments to people like us for no reason." He patted her shoulder with one broad hand. "Let me tell you something, kid—Iris. If you're going to go on with this, you ought to stick up for yourself. If you don't take some pride, nobody's going to hand it to you. You can't just sit there and look hurt, or they'll really dig in."

"I hate them," she said fervently.

"That isn't right. They're good people, and I bet there's others who might feel the way I do about it. I mean, if you go around looking unhappy or ashamed about what you're doing, you'll just prove their point—that it's a waste."

"You could have said something at supper," she said, still feeling a little resentful.

"I'm only your father," Tad responded, "and a guest in this house. I can't hang around here just to prop you up, you have to do that for yourself. Look, if you do all right at whatever you're learning, then you'll get to do what you want—the Linkers'll see to that. And if you don't, then nobody here's going to change that, either. At least you'll know you tried, and that has to be better than not trying."

She leaned back on her elbows, letting her feet dangle from the bed. "Did you try, Tad?"

His lip curled. "No, I'm doing what I want. I'm sort of hoping I might get a chance at satellite repair—they still need some people for that. I put in my name for sea wall work too. See, if I get to do any of that, I won't be coming by here again for a long time, maybe not until you're a woman, so I have to say whatever I have to tell you now. In a way, it's easier for a Plains boy. At least if he learns some skill or craft, he gets to go places."

"Julia worked on dikes once," Iris said.

"Yeah, but here she is, right? I've worked with a few woman mechanics. They do all right, but they always seem to get dragged home after a while, especially if they want kids. You can't go roaming around with a baby. Anyway, you need farmers. There's only one way out for a farm girl. You have to have something that makes you more valuable to the Mukhtars somewhere else."

"I wouldn't leave Lincoln," Iris murmured. "I mean, not for good."

"I don't know if you'd be studying if you didn't think of leaving."

Iris gazed into Tad's grayish-green eyes. He was more understanding than she had realized. His rough horseplay, like her feeble efforts to appease her friends, might have been only a way of hiding his real feelings.

"There's one place I'd like to go," she said.

"And where's that?"

"Venus."

"Venus! You want to work on the Project?" Tad snorted, then rubbed his nose on his sleeve. She looked down, hurt; he would laugh at her after all. "Hey, Iris, don't sit there like that. You just surprised me, that's all."

She tugged at his shirt. "Don't tell Angharad. She'd just—"

"Yeah, I know." Tad frowned for a moment; his drooping mouth and lowered eyelids made him look like a boy who had lost something precious. "I won't tell. But why would you want to go there?"

Iris bit her lip, unable to find the words to answer him.

"What do you know about it, anyway?"

"A lot. I've seen it all with my band—how the Parasol was built, why they brought in metallic hydrogen from Saturn."

"Why'd they do that?" Tad asked.

"Because otherwise, as the atmosphere changes, there'd be too much free oxygen. I mean, as it cools and the level of carbon dioxide goes down, more oxygen is freed, and they can't just leave it there, but when it combines with the hydrogen, it can turn into water. Venus didn't have enough hydrogen there before, so they had to bring it there, you see. It's complicated."

Tad frowned. "I guess it is." He was silent for a moment. "I don't know. I can't see people living there, but—"

"That's just one of the things they've done there. They have to do a lot more."

"Well, I know that much."

"They even had to make a new kind of algae for seeding the cloud layer. See, the rain has a lot of sulfuric acid in it, but the algae metabolizes—" She had mangled that word. "Well, it sort of eats the acid and changes it into other things—iron and copper sulfides."

"You understand all of that?" Tad asked.

"Sort of. It's not really part of the prep lessons, but—Venus is my star, it was in the sky when I was born. I wanted to know about it."

"Well, that won't get you to the Project." Tad raised one leg, resting his ankle on his knee. "And no one's going to live on Venus for a long time—if ever."

"You might be wrong. Some people think that if they can set up domes, domes something like those on the Islands but strong enough to stand the air pressure and protect everything inside, that people could live there in forty or fifty years."

Tad tilted his head. "It'd be hard living like that—maybe dangerous too. But I wouldn't mind trying it, maybe, building a real home. Wandering around gets sort of lonely after a while." He sighed. "Sounds like you know some things, even if I don't really understand them." He laughed. "You know, one time I was talking to my friends about our kids—we were talking about what they'd be like when they grew up. Most of them said the usual—wanting to take their boys along on jobs, or as apprentices—maybe taking their girls along, too, if they could do the work and their mothers'd let them travel for a bit. Donny wants his girl to be a shopkeeper in Ames. You know what I said?"

Iris shook her head.

"I said I'd want a kid who was so smart I wouldn't know what she was talking about." He chuckled; Iris smiled. "I'd want her to be bettter than me."

"You're all right the way you are," Iris said, blushing. Her father averted his eyes, looking embarrassed.

"You're the only kid I have, you know—not that I don't try for some more." Tad moved his hands awkwardly. "Well, I hope you get to that place someday. Listen to me—you just keep doing what you're doing."

"I wish the others—"

"Forget about the others. Just remember what I said."

She heard a knock. The door slid open; Angharad stood there, dressed in a sheer blue gown slit to her thighs. She beamed at the pair, as if pleased to see the father and daughter together. Tad rubbed Iris's head roughly and poked her in the ribs as he got up. "We'll go to the shops tomorrow, see the opening, all right?" He paused as Angharad draped her small, rounded body seductively against the door frame. "All three of us," he added, for Angharad's benefit.

An ocean of wheat, brown waves in contours rippling under the summer sun, surrounded the island of Lincoln. The strain was a strong one, able to endure, up to a point, scorching sunshine, heavy rainfall, or cooler temperatures. Iris, for the first time, had helped to sow the seeds, putting on her band to link first with a plow and then with a sower, guiding the metal servants with her mind.

Part of her day was also spent in the greenhouse down the street, which her household shared with several others, where she checked on the carefully tended tiers of lettuce, beans, vegetables, and fruits. She had already heard Angharad and other farmers discuss the possibility of keeping the greenhouse in operation during the coming winter. Usually the communes kept most of the produce for their own use, but the agricultural coordinators up in Winnipeg, the Plains capital, had told all of the communes and towns that more of their greenhouse crops would be exported in coming years. That meant that there had to be shortages somewhere. The communes would get more credit, but also more work.

Iris felt that she had enough work as it was. She took her turn looking after LaDonna's infant daughter Mira, who had been born in early spring and had the unpleasant habit of spewing spittle into Iris's face or over her clothes. Iris did both her farm and household tasks, and all of it left little time for her lessons. She had been hoping to make up the time during the coming winter; now the greenhouse was likely to rob her of some of those precious moments.

She crouched in the field, hiding herself in the tall grain. Laiza had suggested a game of hide and seek earlier. Iris looked up at the clear blue sky. It hadn't rained for some time; Dory Trudes, the mayor, had already sent a request to Winnipeg for some rain. A few rainclouds might be routed their way if the rain were not needed more elsewhere and if the task could be done without altering climatic patterns too greatly. The Nomarchies tended to be cautious about such matters. It was not wise to tamper too much, to risk a possible miscalculation or a renewal of the conflicts over resources and fertile land that had nearly destroyed Earth more than five hundred years ago. At any rate, much of the grain could outlast even this drought.

I should be doing lessons, Iris thought. But she liked to get outside whenever the heat did not confine her to the house, and she would get in an hour of study before bedtime. Her friends still teased her about her pursuits, but more gently. The story of her encounter with Jawaharlal had grown in the telling until some believed that the Linker had predicted great things for her. If there was a chance the girl might rise, perhaps to a Counselor's post or even to a position such as Regional Coordinator, it would not hurt to be on her good side; at the same time, a little ribbing would keep her from getting a swelled head.

Iris heard a shriek, then a shout from Daria; the red-haired girl had tagged Tommy as he was racing for the tractor that was their goal. Iris peered out through the grain, watching while Tommy protested to Daria, then ducked back before Daria could see her.

Tad had sent her a message that morning. She hadn't believed her father when he had told her that he would send messages regularly, but he had sent three since spring and two had been confidential, for her alone. Those had been transmissions, recordings of his words and image, but the third had been a call where she had been able to talk to him. His image had appeared on the screen in the common room, as lifelike as if he had actually been present. Iris had accepted his call there instead of in her room, knowing that Angharad and Constance would want to talk to him also and not wanting to seem selfish.