Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus Page 3

  “You led me to believe she’d already forgotten everything she saw or did for the last three years,” he said petulantly, straining to keep his voice down.

  “The permanence—that is, the degree—of retroactive amnesia due to loss of short-term memory is often unpredictable…”

  “Why am I learning this now?” he snarled, loud enough to make heads turn.

  “…except that, as ever, we can be completely confident that she will never remember anything that occurred after the intervention.” The gray woman paused. “Until the reintervention. Before today, that is.”

  The two of them fell silent, and for a moment no one in the dark room spoke. They all studied the helicopter, which was fleeing its own shadow over snowy hummocks, over frozen ponds, among pines and aspens, down steep defiles, a darting dragonfly with its twin interlocking rotors fluttering like membranous wings in the crosshairs of the tracking satellite, but with a more evident purpose to its flight.

  The image stuttered momentarily, then steadied at a slightly different angle, as a new satellite took over the tracking task.

  “Mr. Laird,” said the tracking operator, “I don’t know if this is significant…”

  “Let’s have it,” said the gray man.

  “The target has been gradually turning counter-clockwise for the past two minutes. It is now on a southeasterly heading.”

  “She’s lost,” someone—an enthusiastic aide—volunteered. “She’s flying blind and she doesn’t know which way she’s going.”

  The gray man ignored him. “Give me the whole sector.”

  The image on the screen immediately widened to show the Great Plains surging like a frozen ocean against the Front Range, the cities beached there like flotsam: Cheyenne, Denver, Colorado Springs, fused by their suburbs into a single threadlike agglomeration. The helicopter was microscopic, invisible at this scale, although its position was still clearly marked by the centered crosshairs.

  “The target appears to be holding steady on course,” said the operator.

  “Dammit, she’s heading straight for Space Command,” said the gray man. He stared bitterly at the gray woman.

  “Seeking sanctuary?” she said mildly.

  “We’ve got to shoot it down,” blurted the same enthusiastic aide, whose enthusiasm had been converted to panic.

  “With what?” the gray man inquired. “The only armed vehicle we own within five hundred miles of her position is the one she’s flying.” He turned to the woman, hissing the words but hardly bothering to keep them inaudible. “If only I’d never listened to your clever explanations…” He bit off the sentence, snapping his teeth in his fury, and bent over the console. “She’s not using evasion protocols. What’s the chance of jamming her?”

  “We can’t jam the target’s navigation and control circuits, sir. They’re shielded against everything.”

  “Outgoing transmissions?”

  “We’d have a good chance there.”

  “Do it right away.”

  “Sir, that’s not exactly a surgically precise operation. Air Defense Command will pop a gasket.”

  “Do it now. I’ll take care of ADC.” He turned to an aide. “A blackline to Commander in Chief, NORAD. Let me see the profile before you put it through.”

  The aide handed him a phonelink. “CINCNORAD is a General Lime, sir. His profile’s coming on screen B.”

  The gray man spoke into the phonelink and waited, quickly reading the general’s psychological profile off the little flatscreen, planning his spiel as he shifted his attention to the big screen.

  The spy satellite’s crosshairs moved inexorably toward Air Force Space Command headquarters east of Colorado Springs. A curt voice came on the line, and the gray man quickly replied. “General, Bill Laird here”—his voice was warm, confiding, deferential—“I’m very sorry to disturb you, but I have a serious problem and I’m afraid I’ve let it get out of hand—so much so, in fact, I confess it’s become your problem too. Which will explain the EM interference your people are experiencing on combat channels…”

  The phone conversation drew heavily upon the director’s resources of amiability and persuasion. It was not the last call he had to make; General Lime refused to commit to action without confirmation from Laird’s superior.

  More earnest lies went through the aether, and when the director finally put the phone down he was trembling behind his tight smile. He yanked at the gray woman’s sleeve and propelled her back into the shadows. “This program is about to be ended, thanks to you,” he said angrily. “And we will have lost years of work. Do you think I can hold my post after this debacle? We’ll be lucky to escape prosecution.”

  “I certainly doubt that the president would…”

  “You! Keep her alive, you said.”

  “She was magnificent, William. In the early stages. She was a natural adept.”

  “She never committed herself to the Knowledge.”

  “She’s still a child!”

  He gave her an angry cough for a reply. He paced about, brooding, then halted, shaking his head. “Right. Time we dissolve our band, disperse into the common herd.”

  “William…”

  “Oh, we’ll be in touch,” he said bitterly. “There will be places in government for both us, I’m sure. But a great deal of reconstruction lies ahead.” He knitted his fingers, flexed his arms in his jacket, cracked his knuckles. “That sanatorium will have to go. All of them will have to go. Right now’s the time to do it.”

  The gray woman knew better than to object.

  “This bogie’s a drone?” The sergeant was incredulous. Efficiently she tapped the coordinates of the approaching helicopter into AARGGS, the anti-aircraft railgun guidance system.

  “Story is, it’s some kind of experimental ECM ship that went nuts,” replied the captain. “Ops says the people who let it loose think it’s homing on our ground stations.”

  Out on the perimeter of the Space Command headquarters base, batteries of TEUCER railguns bobbed and swung on their pedestals.

  “Interceptors can’t catch it?”

  “Sure they could catch it. An F-41 could climb right on top of it, look down, shoot down. You seen any of these new army choppers in action, Sergeant? They can fly about three feet off the ground at six hundred klicks. And what’s on the ground between here and the mountains?”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s right. Houses, schools, that sort of thing. So it’s up to us in perimeter defense.”

  The sergeant looked at the radar scope. “Well, in about twenty seconds we’ll know. It’s still coming.” She ordered AARGGS to arm even before the captain told her to do so.

  The Snark howled across suburban ranch-house rooftops and backyard swimming pools and rock gardens, across wide boulevards and artificial lagoons, lifting loose shingles, shaking the last dead leaves from ornamental aspens, terrifying pedestrians, raising dust, and leaving muddy recirculated lagoon water surging in its wake. The helicopter’s antennas were continually broadcasting on all restricted and unrestricted channels as it closed on the base, but it received no reply to its urgent communications. The bare flat ground of the base perimeter swiftly approached…

  As the helicopter screamed in over the fences, over the waiting fire trucks and ambulances and police vehicles, some observers noted—and later testified—that the craft did not appear to be aiming for the forest of space-directed radio antennas that were HQ Space Command’s most distinctive feature, but instead was headed for the Operations Building, in front of which there was a helipad. It was a fine distinction—much too fine upon which to base a split-second decision.

  Three TEUCER hypervelocity missiles leaped into the air as the Snark crossed the perimeter. They were no more than shaped steel rods, dead rounds carrying no explosives, but they impacted with the momentum of meteoroids, of flying bulldozers. Two-tenths of a second after they left the launcher they ripped through the armored helicopter. There was no explosion. The disint
egrated aircraft simply scattered itself over the parade ground like a handful of burning confetti. The larger bits of smoking metal rolled away like charred wads of newspaper.

  3

  Sparta waited among the bare aspens on the edge of the frozen field, waited until the buttery light had faded from the cloud-clotted western sky. Her toes and fingers and earlobes and the tip of her nose were numb, and her stomach was growling. Walking, she hadn’t minded the cold, but when she finally had to stand and wait for darkness she’d begun to shiver. Now that darkness had come, she could move in.

  She’d garnered valuable information from the Snark before—in that split second when it had paused, hovering motionless inches above the ground, computing new coordinates—she’d jumped clear and sent it on its unprotected way. Precisely where she was. Precisely what day, month, and year it was. That last had come as a shock. Memories had been swarming more thickly with every passing minute, but now she knew that even the most recent of them was more than a year old. And in the hours since she’d jumped, while she’d been trudging through the snow, she’d contemplated the burgeoning strangeness of her sense of herself.

  She grasped, viscerally, that in the past hour—even had she not been indulging in self-inspection—her wild and surging sensibilities had started to bring themselves partially under her conscious control; she’d even managed to remember what some of those sensibilities were for … and thus she could better modulate the insistent vividness of her senses—taste, smell, hearing, touch. And her remarkably flexible vision.

  But those senses were still getting away from her—only sporadically, but then overwhelmingly. The acid sweetness of pine needles fallen upon snow threatened more than once to overcome her with swooning ecstasy. The melting mother-of-pearl of the setting sun more than once sent the visible world a-spinning kaleidoscopically, inside her throbbing brain, in an epiphany of light. She waited out those intoxicating moments, knowing that in the scheme of things they must recur, knowing that when they did she could, with effort, suppress them. Then she pressed on.

  She had a much better understanding of the nature of her predicament. She knew it could be fatal if anyone learned of her peculiarities, and equally fatal to put herself in the hands of the authorities, any authorities.

  At last it was dark enough to cover her approach. She trudged across the snowy field toward a far cluster of lights where two narrow asphalt roads, recently plowed, formed a T intersection. One of the weather-bleached wooden buildings had a sign hanging from its rusted iron eaves, lit by a single yellow bulb: “BEER. FOOD.”

  Half a dozen cars were parked in front of the rustic tavern, sporty cars and all-terrain-vehicles with ski racks on top. She stopped outside and listened…

  She heard the clink and thump of bottles, a cat whining for its dinner, the creak of wooden chairs and floorboards, a toilet flushing in the back, and over all a surround-sound system cranked up just shy of pain level. Under the music—hoarse energetic anger of a male singer, rolling thunder of a bass line, twined sinuous howls of a synthekord doing harmony and three kinds of percussion—she picked out some conversations.

  “Rocks and straw,” a girl was saying, “they got a nerve even selling a lift ticket,” and elsewhere a boy was trying to wheedle college class notes out of his companion. At another location—the bar, she estimated—someone was talking about a remodeling job on a nearby ranch. She listened a moment and tuned in on that one; it sounded the most promising—

  “…and this other dolly, blond hair down to there, just standing there staring through me, wearin’ nothin’ but this little pink piece of transparent silk like you see in those department store ads. But like I wasn’t even in the same room.”

  “Prob’ly on somethin’. They’re all on somethin’ up there, man. You know that big sensie-mixer they got, that’s supposed to be payin’ for the place? That guy that runs it’s so Z-based all the time, I don’t know how he feels anythin’…”

  “But the dollies,” said the first voice. “That’s what impressed me. I mean, we’re walkin’ back and forth carryin’ about one plank of knotty pine panel per trip, right? And these blond and brunette and red-headed dollies are just sittin’ and standin’ and lyin’ around there…”

  “Most of the people who come through here, claim they’re goin’ up to rent the studio facilities? They’re just dealin’, man,” the second voice confided. “Just buyin’ and sellin’…”

  Sparta listened until she had what she needed. She let the cacophony fade and turned her attention to the vehicles in the parking lot.

  She tuned her vision toward the infrared until she could see warm handprints glowing on the doorhandles, the brightest of them only a few minutes old. She inspected the more recent arrivals. Their occupants were less likely to be leaving soon. She peered into the interior of a mud-spattered two-seater; bright outlines of human bottoms glowed like valentines in both bucket seats. A lap robe bundled on the floor in front of the passenger seat hid another warm object. Sparta hoped it was what she was looking for.

  Sparta pulled off her right glove. Chitinous spines slid from beneath her fingernails; gingerly, she worked the probes extending from her index and middle fingers into the sliverport in the door on the passenger side. She sensed the minute tingle of electrons along her conducting polymers: images of numerical patterns danced at the threshold of consciousness; the surface molecules of her probes reprogrammed themselves—all so quickly that only the intention was conscious, not the process. As she withdrew her fingertips the probes retracted. The car door swung open, its lock-and-alarm disarmed.

  She pulled her glove on and lifted the lap rug. The object under it, recently handled, was a purse. She removed the registration sliver, then left it as it had been—exactly as it had been, with the lap robe folded precisely as it was folded before, according to the image of it temporarily stored in her memory. She nudged the door closed.

  Sparta stomped the snow off her boots on the covered porch and pushed through the ramshackle double doors, to be greeted by a blast of smoky air and badly amplified surround-sound. Most of the small crowd were couples, college kids on the way back from skiing. A few local males, wearing tattered jeans and threadbare plaid flannel shirts over red long-johns, were hanging out at the end of the long mahogany bar. Their eyes fixed on her as she walked boldly toward them.

  The carpenter she’d overheard was easy to identify; he was the one wearing a laser-rule in a worn leather holster on his hip. She hitched herself onto the stool beside him and gave him a long, contemptuous stare, her eyes focused slightly behind his head, before turning her eyes to the bartender.

  The bartender’s curly orange hair startled her. That passed quickly—he also wore a frizzy beard. “What’ll it be, lady?”

  “Glass of red. You got anything decent to eat? I’m starved.”

  “Usual autochef stuff.”

  “Hell … cheeseburger, then. Medium. Everything on it. Fries.”

  The bartender went to the grease-streaked stainless steel console behind the bar and shoved four buttons. He took a glass from the overhead rack and stuck a hose into it, filling it with fizzy wine the color of cranberry juice. On the way back he took the burger and fries from the maw of the steel autochef, holding both plates in his wide right hand, and slid everything onto the bartop in front of Sparta. “Forty-three bucks. Servee-compree.”

  She handed him the sliver. He recorded the transaction and laid the sliver in front of her. She let it sit there, wondering which of the women in the tavern was buying her dinner.

  The bartender, the carpenter, and the other men at the bar had apparently run out of conversation; they all stared at Sparta wordlessly while she ate.

  The sensations of smelling, tasting, chewing, swallowing nearly overloaded her eager internal systems. The curdled fat, the carbonized sugar, already half-digested proteins were at once desperately craved and nauseating in their richness. For a few minutes hunger suppressed revulsion.


  Then she was done. But she didn’t look up until she had licked the last drop of grease from her fingers.

  She peered at the carpenter again, giving him the same cold, lingering stare, ignoring the black-bearded man behind him, who stared at her in pop-eyed fascination.

  “I know you from somewhere,” the carpenter said.

  “I never laid eyes on you before in my life,” she said.

  “No, I know you. Wasn’t you one of them up at Cloud Ranch this mornin’?”

  “Don’t mention that place to me. I never want to hear that place mentioned in my presence as long as I live.”

  “So you was up there.” He nodded in satisfaction, giving the bartender a significant glance. His bearded buddy also gave the bartender a significant glance, but what it signified was a mystery to them all. The carpenter turned back to Sparta, looking her slowly up and down. “I knew it was you, just from the way you stared at me. ’Course you don’t much look the same as you did.”

  “How good would you look if you’d been walking in the snow half the day?” She tugged at a strand of her matted brown hair, as if he’d hurt her feelings.

  “Nobody willin’ to give you a ride out?”

  Sparta shrugged and stared straight ahead, pretending to sip the glass of foul wine.

  He persisted. “Get in over your head?”

  “What are you, a stinking shrink?” she snarled. “I play the fiddle. When somebody hires me to play the fiddle, I expect to play the fiddle, period. How come the only people who make money in this business are creeps?”

  “Lady, don’t get me wrong.” The carpenter ran a hand through his matted blond hair. “I thought everybody around here knew they made a lot more than just music sensies up there.”

  “I’m not from around here.”

  “Yeah.” He sipped thoughtfully at his beer. So did his buddy. “Well … sorry.” For a while they all stared at their drinks, a school of philosophers deep in contemplation. The bartender absently swiped at the bartop with his rag.