Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus Page 5

  Now comes new evidence from the New School, favoring the fox…

  Other articles and stories, in a widening circle of media, glamorized the SPARTA project. The little girl who was its first and for a while its only subject became a star—a mysterious star, whose parents insisted she be kept out of public view; there were no pictures of herself among the chips and clippings on Ellen Troy’s desk. Then at last the U.S. territorial government showed interest in the project…

  “Ellen, you’re hiding something.”

  Sparta looked up at the broad brown face in front of her. The big woman wasn’t smiling, exactly, but her accusatory expression hid mischief. “What are you talking about, boss?” Sparta asked.

  The woman settled her considerable weight into the chair facing Sparta’s desk, Ellen Troy’s desk. “Taking first things first, honey, you applied to get out from under my thumb, again. You think Sister Arlene doesn’t know what goes on in her own department?”

  Sparta shook her head once, sharply. “I’m not hiding anything. I’ve been trying to get out from behind this desk for the past two years. As often as the regs let me apply.” The desk in question was one of fifty just like it in the information-processing department of the Board of Space Control’s Investigatory Services Division, housed in a pink brick and blue glass building overlooking Manhattan’s Union Square.

  The boss, Arlene Diaz, was the IP department manager. “You and me both know, anybody’s had the surgery you’ve had doesn’t stand a prayer of getting out of the office and onto the beat. So how come you keep doin’ it, Ellen? Tryin’ to get out there?”

  “Because I keep hoping somebody upstairs has some common sense, that’s why. I want to be judged by what I can do, Arlene. Not by what’s on my scans.”

  Arlene sighed heavily. “Truth is, field supervisors are mighty partial to perfect physical specimens.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, Arlene.” She let the color come into her cheeks. “When I was sixteen some drunk squashed me and my scooter against a light pole. Okay, the scooter was a total loss. But me they patched up—it’s all on file for anybody who wants to look.”

  “You got to admit it was a pretty weird fix, honey. All those lumps and wires and hollow places…” Arlene paused. “I’m sorry. You wouldn’t know it, but it’s policy that when a person wants to transfer, their supervisor sits on the review panel. I’ve pondered your scans, dear. More than a couple of times.”

  “The docs who patched me up did the best they could.” Sparta seemed embarrassed, as if she were apologizing for them. “They were local talent.”

  “They did fine,” Arlene said. “Mayo Clinic it wasn’t, but what they did works.”

  “You think so”—Sparta studied her boss from under arched brows, and became suspicious—“what do the others on the panel think?”

  When Arlene didn’t say anything, Sparta smiled. “Faker,” she said. “You’re the one who’s hiding something.”

  Arlene grinned back at her. “Congratulations, honey. We’re gonna miss you around here.”

  It wasn’t quite that easy.

  There were the physicals to do all over again, the lies to rehearse and keep straight, the phony electronic documents to plant instantly, backing up the new stories.

  And then the work. The six-month basic training for a Space Board Investigator was as rigorous as any astronaut’s. Sparta was smart, quick, coordinated, and she could store far more knowledge than the academy’s instructors had to give (a capacity she did not reveal), but she was not physically strong, and some of the things that had been done to her for reasons she was still trying to understand had left her highly sensitive to pain and vulnerable to fatigue. It was clear from day one that Sparta was in danger of washing out.

  The investigator-trainees did not live in barracks; the Space Board regarded them as adults who would show up for classes if they wanted to and meanwhile keep their noses out of trouble, being responsible for themselves. Sparta reported daily to the training division’s facilities in the New Jersey marshes and each night boarded the magneplane back to Manhattan, wondering if she would have the courage to return the next morning. It was a long ride, not long in minutes so much as in the repeated lesson of what sort of world she lived in. Sweet Manhattan was a jewel nestled in a swamp, cinched in by seaweed and algae farms that filled the once flowing rivers that made it an island, ringed by hideous shacks and crumbled slums beyond the river shores, wholly walled about by smoking refineries that transformed human waste and garbage into hydrocarbons and salvageable metals.

  She barely survived early cut on the shock tests—electrical, thermal, chemical, light, noise, high gees on the centrifuge, spatial disorientation in the bird cage—extreme stresses that consumed all her energy in her silent, secret defense of her delicate neural structures. She struggled through the obstacle courses, the heavy weapons courses, the team contact sports where the brute strength of the other players often overwhelmed her grace and quickness. Exhausted, bruised, her muscles afire and her nerves ragged, she would stumble into the magneplane, glide smoothly through the fires and smoke of Purgatory, arrive late at her NoHo home and climb into her bed in the condo-apt she shared with three strangers she rarely saw.

  Her loneliness and discouragement would get the better of her sometimes, and then she would cry herself to sleep—wondering why she was doing it, how long she could keep doing it. The second question was dependent on the first. If she wavered in her belief that earning credentials as a Space Board investigator would give her the access, the freedom she needed to know what she needed to, her resolve would quickly crumble.

  At night there were the dreams. In a year she had not found a sure way to control them. They would begin innocently enough with some fragment of the distant past, her mother’s face—or with the immediate past, some boy she’d met that very day, or a classroom lecture she’d not been prepared for, or been overprepared for—and then they’d segué into the dark corridors of an endless building, a vague goal to be achieved if only she could find her way through the maze, the sense that her friends were with her but that she was utterly alone, that it made no difference whether or not she found what she needed but that if she didn’t she would die—and then the colored lights came wheeling in, gently, from the edges, and the riot of smells overcame her.

  Trainees had Sundays off. Sparta habitually spent hers walking Manhattan, from one side to the other, from the Battery to the Bronx, even in rain, snow, sleet, and wind. Although she was not strong, she was tough. Twenty-five miles in a day was not unusual for her. She walked to free her mind of focused thought, of the need to detect and plan and store data. Periodic mental rest was essential to avoid overload and breakdown.

  As originally conceived, the SPARTA project would never have used artificial brain implants. But when government agencies came in, the project changed; suddenly there were many more students, and new and larger facilities. Sparta was a teenager then, and it didn’t seem strange at first that she saw less of her busy parents, and less of the others, most of them younger children, of whom only one or two were near her own age. One day her father called her into his office and explained that she was to be sent away to Maryland for a series of government evaluations. He promised that he and her mother would visit as often as they could manage. Her father seemed under great strain; before she left the room he hugged her tightly, almost desperately, but he said nothing beyond a murmured “Good-bye” and “We love you.” A man with orange hair had been there in the office the entire time, watching.

  Of what came next her memory was still fragmented. Down in Maryland they had done far more than test her, but much of what they had done to her brain she had only recently deduced. What they had done to her body she was still learning.

  Sparta walked up the airy length of Park Avenue, toward the Grand Central Conservatory. It was early spring; the day was sunny and warm. Along the avenue the rows of decorative cherry trees were in full bloom, their fragran
t pink petals drifting like perfumed confetti onto the glittering esplanade. Shining glass and steel, scrubbed concrete and polished granite rose all about her; helicopters threshed the lanes of air among their tops. Omnibuses and an occasional police cruiser whispered past on the smooth pavement. Magneplanes hummed in swift assurance along thin steel tracks held aloft on high pylons, while quaint old electric subway cars, painted in cheerful colors, clattered and screeched beneath Sparta’s feet, visible through blocks of glass paving.

  Early in the century, when the mid-Atlantic states had been merged for administrative convenience, Manhattan had been designated a federal demonstration center—“Skyscraper National Park,” as cynics would have it. Although the island was ringed with stinking industries and fetid suburbs, the streets of the model city were crowded, and most people in the crowd were sleek, colorfully and expensively dressed, happy-faced. In federal demonstration centers poverty was a crime, punishable by resettlement.

  Sparta was not among the cheerful. Pass/fail in her training program was two months away. After that the physical stress would lift a bit and the academic side would take over, but just now she trembled on the brink of quitting. Sixty exhausting days to go. At this moment she felt she couldn’t make it.

  As she approached the formal gardens of the 42nd Street mall she noticed a man following her. She wondered how long he’d been at it; she’d been deliberately tuned out, walking in a semi-trance, or she would have seen him instantly. He could be someone in the training division checking up on her. He could be someone else.

  She roused herself to maximum alertness. Stopping at a flower stand, she raised a bunch of yellow daffodils to her nose. The flowers had no perfume, but their heady vegetable odor exploded in her brain. She peered through them, closing one eye, her macrozoom gaze zeroing in…

  He was young, with thick auburn hair chopped in the fashion of the day, and he wore a stylish, shiny black polymer jacket. He was a handsome young man of obvious Chinese and Black Irish ancestry, with high cheekbones, soft dark eyes, and a sprinkle of freckles; at present he seemed oddly uncomfortable and uncertain.

  As soon as she’d stopped at the flower stand he had hesitated, and for a moment she thought he was going to come forward, say something. Instead he turned and pretended to study a display in the nearest store window. To his evident dismay, it was a clothing store displaying expensive women’s underwear. When he realized what he was looking at, his skin brightened under his freckles.

  She had identified him instantly, although the last time she’d seen him he’d looked quite different; he’d only been sixteen years old. He’d had even more freckles then, and his crewcut hair had been redder. His name was Blake Redfield. He was a year younger than she was, and he was the closest to her age of all the other students in the original SPARTA.

  But she could see that he wasn’t yet sure he recognized her. Unlike the girl she reminded him of, whose hair had been long and brown, Ellen Troy was a dishwater blond; she wore her unremarkable medium light hair in a practical cut, straight and short. Her eyes were blue and her lips were full. But despite these superficial alterations, Ellen’s facial bone structure had not been altered, could not have been safely altered, so to a great extent Ellen still resembled the girl whose name had been Linda.

  Luckily Blake Redfield was as bashful as ever, too shy to walk up to a strange woman on the street.

  Sparta handed the flower vendor her sliver, took the daffodils, and walked on. She tuned her hearing to Blake’s footsteps, selectively amplifying the distinctive click, click of his heels from the hundreds of other slaps and taps and shuffles that rolled around her. It was essential that she lose him, but in a way that kept him from realizing he’d been seen. Strolling as aimlessly as before, she passed under the arches of the Grand Central Conservatory.

  The last time she’d visited the conservatory the scenery was sand and rocks and spiny things, with twisted desert peaks rising in the distance, but the theme this month was tropical. On every side palms and hardwoods reached for the lofty ceiling and lacy draperies of vines and orchids descended. Eastman Kodak’s panoramic hologram extended the jungle view to a distant landscape of mist and waterfalls.

  There were a lot of people in the conservatory, but most of them were on the mezzanine looking into the forest galleries from above, or strolling the broad paths that surrounded the central forest. She paused, then walked casually into the trees. The thick mat of leaves on the floor muffled the hoots of monkeys and the screeches of parrots overhead. She’d gone a few steps into the green shadows and then, even without amplification, she could plainly hear Blake’s footsteps on the path behind her.

  Another casual turn here, into a narrow path behind a screen of vines as fat and tangled as the tentacles of a giant squid… Blake’s footsteps hesitated, but he made the turn and stayed on her trail.

  Another turn, behind glossy dark leaves as big as the elephant ears they were named for, but stiffer, like dead, dried leather. Yet another turn among the knees of a sprawling banyan, its roots like veils of pale wood as smooth and thin as travertine stone. Suddenly she came upon the awesome waterfall, which descended in soundless torrents into the glistening gorge below. Behind her, Blake was still coming—but hesitantly now.

  The true thunder of the waterfall was muted, but realistic mist drifted from sprinklers high in the walls, invisible behind the holographic projection. A vista point with a rustic bamboo railing, presently deserted, was perched on the edge of the vast, illusory gorge into which the water careened.

  Sparta crouched against a tree trunk, wondering what to do. She had hoped to leave Blake Redfield behind her in the movie-set rain forest, but he was not to be shaken so easily. She took the risk of losing track of his whereabouts in order to tune her hearing to the high-frequency hum of the Kodak hologram’s projection system. The depth-of-focus circuitry was mounted somewhere on the wall a few feet in front of her. The shape of the electric pulses gave her a crude approximation of its program, but she had no physical access to the control center—

  —then an unsettling sensation came over her, spreading from her midsection up through her chest to her arms. Her belly began to burn. The sensation was strange and familiar at the same time. When studying her own scans, months ago, she had seen the sheetlike structures under her diaphragm and suspected she knew what they were, powerful polymer batteries, but she could not remember how to utilize them, or even what they were for. Suddenly, responding to her unconscious demand, that memory returned.

  She stretched out her arms and hands and curved them into the arc of a microwave-length antenna. Her facial mask set in concentration. Data cascaded through her frontal lobes; she beamed a single burst of instructions into the heart of the projection control processor.

  The hologram leaped forward. Tons of water descended upon her—

  —and she was staring at the old railroad station’s polished marble wall. She lowered her arms and relaxed her trance. She walked to the fake bamboo railing of the vista point, which stood on the floor less than three feet from the wall. Above her an array of hologram projectors twinkled yellow, cyan, and magenta. She turned back and looked at the jungle trees. She could see nothing of the animated hologram from inside the projection, but if her beamed instructions had worked, the apparent edge of that deep gorge should now be at the end of the path, just in front of the trees…

  Blake emerged from the jungle, took two steps toward her and stopped, staring past her head at torrents of cascading water. His eyes followed the water down into the gorge.

  Her back was to the railing. In a step she could have reached out and touched his handsome, friendly, freckled face. A crumpled chewing gum pack lay on the floor between them, where he saw canyons of mist. The light on him was just that which the conservatory’s skylights and the projected whitewater of the hologram spilled on him. There was nothing at all between them except the chewing gum pack and that insubstantial light.

  She was reminded
how much she had liked him, once, although at that age she wasn’t much interested in younger kids—she was a sophisticated seventeen and he was only a gawky sixteen, after all—and she probably hadn’t been much good at communicating simple feelings anyway.

  Now, simply by knowing that she existed, he could destroy her. Blake ran a hand through his auburn hair, then turned away, bemused, into the jungle. Sparta ducked under the rail. She walked along the smooth marble wall, emerged from behind the waterfall, and disappeared into a crowded passage that led toward Madison Avenue.

  Blake Redfield paused in the trees and looked back at the tumbling water. He was a product of the early SPARTA, the pure SPARTA, before it had been disbanded. There had been no tinkering with his physical nature, only with the conditions of his education. He had no zoom-lens eyes or tunable ears, no enhanced RAM in his skull or PIN spines under his fingernails, no batteries in his belly or antennas wrapped around his bones.

  But he was multiply intelligent too, bright enough to have recognized Linda immediately, bright enough to have realized immediately that she did not wish to be recognized. And he was curious enough to wonder why. After all, he’d half-suspected she was dead…

  So he’d followed her until she disappeared. He wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed that, but he knew it was deliberate.

  He had long wondered what became of her. Now he wondered just how hard it would be to find out.

  PART

  2

  THE SEVEN PILLARS

  OF WISDOM

  5

  In the last part of the 21st century the sky had grown ever more crowded, from ground level right on up into space, until little Earth was ringed like giant Saturn—with machines and vehicles, not with innocent snowballs. There were bright power stations collecting sunlight and beaming microwaves to antenna farms in Arabia and Mongolia and Angola and Brazil. There were refineries, using sunlight to smelt metal from moon sand and captured asteroids, distilling hydrocarbons from carbonaceous chondrites and mining diamonds from meteoroids. There were factories that used these materials to cast the perfect ball bearing, to brew the perfect antibiotic, to extrude the perfect polymer. There were luxury terminals to serve the great interplanetary liners and entertain their wealthy passengers, and there were orbiting dockyards for the working freighters. There were a dozen shipyards, two dozen scientific stations, a hundred weather satellites, five hundred communications satellites, a thousand spy-eyes twinkling among the night stars, measuring the Earth, seeking out the last of its resources, gauging the flow of its precious and dwindling fresh water, watching and listening to the constantly shifting alliances, the occasional flare-ups of battle on the surface of the world below—like the vicious tank and helicopter engagement presently raging in south central Asia. By intricate international treaty, all weapons with a range of over one kilometer were barred from space, including rockets, railguns, beam projectors, every sort of directed-energy device, and even exploding satellites, whose debris would spread unchecked, but excluding satellites themselves. So another few thousand objects orbiting the Earth were essentially inert, little more than bags of moon rocks, mischievous threats by one power bloc against another to destroy orbiting facilities by simple collision, although implicit was the ability to destroy whole cities on Earth by guided artificial meteorite.