Venus of Dreams (9 page)

A statue of Mary the Co-Redeemer had been placed to the left of the altar. She wore a long, flowing robe, but the carved wooden face had the thin, sharp features of many Plainswomen, and She held a sheaf of wheat. Her Son, standing next to Her, held a carpenter's saw; like the men of Lincoln, He had left His Mother to wander his land.

Mary had wept for Her Son at the cross. Tad's mother might be weeping for him now.

Iris bowed her head, trying to pray for her father and herself. Give him peace, she thought. Give me the strength not to show my grief.

Her hands began to shake; rage seized her, threatening to burst from her lungs in a long scream. You could have saved him, she thought. You didn't have to let him die.

She stood up and gazed at the statues coldly. They seemed more distant from her, and less caring, than even those who controlled the Nomarchies. An individual life was no more to them than part of a pattern, a thread broken off when that part of the design was completed.

The air inside the church was oppressive. You've done nothing for us, she thought, unsure of whether she was thinking of Mary or of the Linkers and Mukhtars. Once, it had comforted her to think of all the saints who could carry her prayers to God; now, she imagined a host of saints who looked down at her with vacant eyes as the jewels of Linkers gleamed on their foreheads, who granted some prayers and refused others.

Mary's eyes seemed to glitter as the moonlight wavered. Iris covered her face, knowing that Mary could see her thoughts. Her own prayer had been granted; Celia had given her what she wanted.

Forgive me. I have a prayer for you now, Mother of God. Let me learn, let me do something fine, let me be someone my father would have been proud of.

The prayer seemed pointless. For the first time, Iris felt as though her words were addressed to a mindless void. Those who had granted her wish had taken her father's life. There was no reason in that, only chance and the thoughtlessness of men and women.

She turned and walked down the aisle. Tad had talked of going to Venus someday when they had been together; now he would never have that chance. She might be one in her mother's line, but Tad's genes were part of her as well. She would find a way out of Lincoln. She would go to a place where people built what they wanted instead of accepting what they were given.

Five

The two men sat on blue cushions in a small, lighted room bare of any ornament except for a shelf on the wall above them. A cloisonné plate, a porcelain vase holding one blue flower, and an ornate headdress that might once have been a crown stood on the shelf. The men had sipped their tea, but had hardly touched the small cakes arranged on the low glass table that sat between them. They spoke in low voices, and nodded politely from time to time as they drank from their white cups.

Pavel Gvishiani was beginning to grow restless. He shifted on his cushion and plucked at the long white robe that covered his folded legs. He smiled at the other man; the smile was making his jaw ache. He had not been pleased to see Yukio Nakasone arrive on his doorstep; there had been no need for the Guardian commander to come here aboard the shuttle arriving from Anwara. Pavel had already endured at least an hour's worth of allusive and indirect conversation while waiting for Yukio to get to the point.

Yukio's Link glittered on his forehead; his ceremonial weapon, a slender wand, was at his waist. Pavel had always thought that Links were wasted on high Guardian officers, who rarely had what he considered proper training in their use. Guardian commanders drew on the cyberminds for their own limited purposes, seemingly unaware of the intellectual riches a Link could provide.

Yukio put his cup down. "I've enjoyed our talk," he said to Pavel in Anglaic; they had been speaking in Arabic before, and Pavel began to hope that this change signaled an end to the conversation. "It's a pity, really, that we have to rely on the Habbits at all."

At last Yukio was being direct. "Habbers," Pavel responded, still smiling. "They don't care for the term Habbits."

"I don't care what they like to be called," the younger man said forcefully. His broad nose wrinkled. "I don't spend enough time with them to know their preference."

Pavel nodded. "Of course not." He was surprised at the Guardian's emotional tone; Katy Szekely, the Guardian commander who had preceded Yukio on Anwara, the space station that orbited Venus, had never displayed any of her feelings quite so openly.

"It's best to have as little to do with them as possible, even if you must put up with them here."

"Indeed," Pavel said.

"I just wanted to make that point. Some people here seem to forget it. You
will
see the Linker who came here with me as soon as possible."

"I'll see him tomorrow at the latest," Pavel said, smiling now with some genuine pleasure. The young Guardian commander had to be somewhat insecure in his new position to have come here to the Islands to make that request; Pavel had known that he would have to see the returning Linker. Yukio was only trying to impress Pavel with his authority.

Pavel lowered his eyes to the gold star on Yukio's black shirt. Through his own Link, Pavel had gained access to the younger man's record, and had suspected that Yukio was one who longed for more power than he now had, but he had not expected the Guardian to confirm his suspicions so soon. That was good; a man who could not hide his feelings well could be manipulated more easily.

Poor Yukio, Pavel thought. He didn't belong in the Guardians. He would sit inside Anwara with the small Guardian force that space station had, waiting in frustration for a battle that would never come. The Mukhtars held the Guardians on a very short leash, making sure that they kept the peace instead of disturbing it. Yukio would have to be careful, or those above him might remove him from the Guardian force and assign him to the training of a city militia, thus stifling any ambitions he might have.

Yukio might have been happier doing useful work for the Project, where he would have had a constructive outlet for his energies, but the uniform of a Guardian allowed him the chance to strut. Luckily, the Islanders had no Guardians living among them; their tiny militia, volunteers drawn from among the Counselors on the Project, was enough to keep order. They needed no Guardians here.

"I'm very glad you came to see me personally," Pavel went on. "It's good to see that you take our little problem so seriously. Perhaps I'll even see that returning Linker this evening."

Pavel waited until the other man stood up before rising himself. "Shall I accompany you to the airship bay?" he asked.

Yukio shook his head. "That isn't necessary."

"To the entrance, then." Pavel ushered the smaller man out of the room. They walked down a curving hallway of closed doors adorned with Arabic script until they came to the wide, open doorway that led outside. "God go with you," Pavel murmured. "Have a safe journey back." The Guardian bowed slightly from the waist.

Pavel watched Yukio's broad back as the man descended the steps; the younger man's shoulders were stiff and his back straight. Pavel's mouth twitched. The Nomarchies had no shortage of such people, restless and overly proud men and women who were grateful to the Mukhtars for the chance to feel important. The three Guardians waiting at the bottom of the steps stood up as Yukio approached them; the commander clicked his heels before the group marched away. A few workers were passing by along the white stone path; one of the women giggled and rolled her eyes as the Guardians strutted off.

From the entrance to the Administrators' residence, Pavel could see a green park of trees and shrubs; a few tables lined the pathway below. To his left, nearly hidden by the trees, he glimpsed the round stone structure housing the Habbers who worked with the Project. Overhead, the lighted dome covering Island Two glowed with a soft, yellow light. The Islanders still marked their hours and days as Earthfolk did, with a golden glow overhead during their twelve-hour days and a dimmer, silvery glow as the twelve-hour night passed.

The domes were their only source of light, for the Parasol hid them from the sun, and the world below was cloaked in that massive umbrella's shadow. The Islands floated in the Venusian atmosphere, above the dark cloud layers, drifting slowly around the world they sought to tame. Venus's gravity held them; the thin upper atmosphere in which they floated offered some protection against meteor strikes. The scars and repaired punctures on the dome, where debris had managed to wound the protective shield, were invisible from where Pavel stood; he could forget, looking out at the green expanse and the people strolling by, that he was on a platform, dwelling on one of eleven Islands above raging winds and a still-deadly world.

Pavel turned and went back inside, relieved at being rid of the Guardians. An Island airship would carry Yukio and his aides to Island One, where a shuttle would return them to high Venus orbit and Anwara. That space station was their link to Earth, the place where spaceships docked and shuttles carried the spaceships' cargo to the Islands. Representatives of the Project Council usually stayed on Anwara, along with other Linkers and some specialists, but the small group of Guardians was with them to remind them of their loyalty to the Nomarchies. Here on the Islands, it was sometimes easy for Pavel to forget that he served the Mukhtars as well.

He stopped in front of his door, pressing his hand against the lock panel. The door whispered open and he entered, seated himself on one of the cushions, then opened his Link, listening to the hum of the cyberminds as images, equations, projections, and other data flowed out to the specialists and workers.

Pavel had been born on Island Two. His grandparents had come to Venus as workers; his parents, taking advantage of the schools on the Islands that were open even to the children of workers, had been able to rise and become engineers. Pavel had surpassed them. Though the study of mathematics had attracted him, he had seen how he might acquire some influence, and had supplemented his studies with work in the muddier and more ambiguous area of psychology. Often, even in his present position, he wondered whether he had made the right choice. He thought of Yukio and the man's silly pride in his Guardian uniform, and sympathized with the commander for a moment.

At the beginning of 533, two years earlier, Pavel had become a member of Island Two's Administrative Committee. Though each of the other Islands had such a Committee, Island Two's dominated the others, and Pavel in turn dominated his own. Many already addressed him as "Mukhtar" instead of calling him by name; occasionally, he chided them for doing so while feeding his pride secretly. Venus would have a Mukhtar someday, when it became one of Earth's Nomarchies, and he could hope that Earth would consider him the logical choice for such a post.

The Project was his life. Pavel had taken no bondmate and had fathered no children; he wanted to live in the memories of the first Cytherians through his own deeds rather than those of his descendants. Happily, few of the five thousand souls on this Island, or the other forty-five thousand on the other Islands, held this decision against him. Though most of them, whatever their previous customs, had come to place great importance on family ties, which promoted social stability among the Islanders, Pavel's freedom from such ties gave him an air of impartiality. He would be fair, and favor no one above another, as if he were the father of all.

Sometimes, when he viewed the Project's past, and considered the arguments that had been raised against terraforming, he could feel a bit of sympathy for those who had wanted to preserve Venus as an object of study. Those scientists had seen Venus as a planetary laboratory, one from which they might gain insights into planetary evolution. They had tentatively painted a picture of a young Venus with lakes and a shallow ocean orbiting a cooler sun billions of years ago, until the sun had grown hotter and the water evaporated under the increased heat, separating into hydrogen and oxygen. The scientists had imagined a landscape of volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide into the air, while the lighter hydrogen atoms escaped the Cytherian world and the heavier oxygen atoms combined with carbon and the surface rocks. They hypothesized a possible further catastrophe, the impact of a large asteroid or other body on Venus's surface, to account for its slow, retrograde motion.

Those wanting to preserve Venus had found enough evidence to make their hypothesis tenable, if not certain. Oxides were locked in the terrain and the proportion of deuterium atoms to hydrogen, a hundred times as great as on Earth, showed that an ocean might once have existed on the surface. Traces of organic material had even suggested that life might have begun to form billions of years earlier.

But these speculations had doomed those standing in the Project's way, for those wanting to alter the world could claim that they were restoring Venus to what it might have been. Even now, terraforming was destroying whatever other evidence might exist for those hypotheses; Venus, always a mysterious world, would keep many of its secrets. Pavel could sometimes regret the loss of that knowledge, while accepting it as part of the price of the Project.

Dimly, through his Link, Pavel sensed the questions of a Habber who was probing the cyberminds. Habbers had worked with the Project almost since its beginnings; even the Mukhtars on Earth had seen that Habber help was needed here. Without the Habbers, the three installations on Venus's equator could not have been built, though few cared to admit that openly. Habber robots had built those pyramids on Venus's surface, had sunk the rods anchoring them deep into the crust. Habber technology had constructed the gravitational pulse engines inside the pyramids and had captured the mini-black holes that would power those mighty engines. Eventually, those engines would release their power, and Venus would rotate more rapidly; the magnetic field thus created would protect the planet from solar radiation even when the Parasol no longer shaded it. Habbers had made that possible; Earth could not have built the installations alone. The Habbers who had forced peace on Earth long ago still doled out a few small gifts from time to time.