Venus of Shadows (51 page)

"You're in Ishtar," he said. "Risa says that all those times you were living here, you were in it and you didn't tell her — that's why she got mad at you. You lied to her."

"I didn't lie. I just didn't tell her everything I was doing. Surely you see why I had to keep it a secret — she wouldn't have understood. But I knew she'd find out someday. It wasn't as if I were going to hide it from her forever — that would have been wrong." She smiled, showing her perfect teeth. "I'm sure you must have a few secrets of your own you don't share — most children do."

He looked down, wondering if she knew anything about the volunteers who had confronted Lucas Ghnassia and what they had wanted with him.

"Don't you know why I joined Ishtar?" she continued. Her voice sounded gentler; Dyami lifted his head. "I want a world that's better than the one we have now, where no one ever has to feel lost and alone. I want a world in which the barriers that separate people have fallen away, where we can love one another and share what we have freely. Wouldn't you like to live in such a world, one where you'd be at peace with all your brothers and sisters, where you could trust everyone?"

"You're not supposed to talk about Ishtar here," Dyami said.

"I was only trying to explain — I understand your feelings, and Risa's, too. I've had my doubts and I still struggle with them. I wonder whether Ishtar can bring us to something better. But where else can we turn? So many of us have lost sight of what the Project was meant to be. The Island specialists see it as a kind of laboratory — they can't see beyond their own narrow goals. The settlers here think only of giving their children more than they had, even if that means someone else might have less. Surely —"

Dyami felt the jolt then. He stood still for an instant and then the ground lurched under him, throwing him onto the grass. The trees above him swayed wildly; his hands clawed at the dirt. He heard a sharp crack; Chimene threw herself across him as a branch struck the path. In the distance, someone was screaming.

He peered over his hands. Across the way, houses swayed, as if they were vessels riding on a sea. He was afraid to look up at the dome, fearing it might begin to crack. Terror welled up inside him; he covered his head.

The ground was still. He clung to Chimene, then managed to sit up. A wing of one house had collapsed; people were already running toward the wreckage.

Chimene stumbled up and pulled him to his feet. "Are you all right?" He nodded. His own house was standing; she spun around and hurried toward the door.

He raced after her. The door opened; apparently it still worked. Chen lay on the floor, his hand around one of his chisels; blood streamed from a gash in his head. Eleta was wailing; he found her in the corridor just outside her room.

"Dyami!" she cried out. He held her, stroking her hair until her sobs subsided.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. She shook her head. "It's all right, it was just a quake. We knew it was going to come." Eleta pressed her lips together and squeezed her eyes shut. "You're safe now."

He led her into the common room. Chimene emerged from Bettina's examination room and knelt beside Chen to clean his wound and bandage his head. "Can you walk?" she asked when she was finished.

"I think so."

"You should rest until Tina gets back. I'd better help you outside — there may be an aftershock before long, and you'll be safer there until we know how damaged the house is."

She helped the old man up; he leaned against her as they walked toward the door. Dyami followed with Eleta. He glanced at the greenhouse as they moved down the path; cracks marred a few of its panes.

Chimene settled Chen on a grassy spot away from the trees. A member of the patrol was near another house, tending to a man who seemed injured. "Dyami," Chimene said, "you have to look out for Chen and Eleta. Somebody else may need help."

She left him and hurried up the path. Alarms were wailing. He could see more of the damage now. A tree had fallen onto the roof of one house; another house, only partially built, lay in ruins. Eleta began to cry again; he reached for her.

*  *  *

During the days that followed the quake, Dyami was too busy to dwell on his new fears. Members of the patrol were organizing the settlers; injured people had to be tended and damage to many of the buildings repaired. Two members of the patrol met the children in the west dome's school; the teachers were needed elsewhere. Some of Dyami's friends, including Teo, were asked to assist the adults who were checking the school to make certain the structure was safe. Others, Dyami among them, helped in clearing away broken tree limbs, rubble, and salvaging anything that could be repaired.

Two aftershocks shook the dome two days after the quake; the first seemed nearly as severe as the quake itself. Dyami found himself moving over the ground tentatively, expecting it to buckle under him at any time. Most of the houses had been left standing, but a few near the lakeshore had been flooded by water overrunning the banks.

The screens were filled with statistics about damage and deaths. All of the settlements had felt the quake, but Hasseen, Lyata, and Mtshana, the communities in the south of the Maxwell range, had sustained the most damage; nearly one hundred people had died in those three dome clusters. Oberg, Dyami supposed, had been lucky, with only twenty deaths, while the two domes in the Freyja Mountains were practically unscathed.

Chen recovered from his head injury after two days of bed rest; only the most severely injured had been taken to the main dome's infirmary. Some of Dyami's neighbors had taken to sleeping outside in tents or unsheltered on mats, but Risa told Dyami there was no need for this. Nikolai and Emilia had checked the house thoroughly, and there would be no danger in staying inside; she explained this very carefully in a calm, measured voice. She did not want her children to give in to their fears, which would only make it harder for them to readjust. They reached a compromise; Sef would stay in Dyami's room for a couple of nights, while Eleta slept with Risa. Dyami gave in, mostly because he did not want Irina mocking him for being afraid.

Irina and her father Nikolai seemed relatively unaffected by the quake and its aftermath; they were simply grateful that everyone in the household was all right. Some of the other children Dyami knew, after the first shock had passed, seemed almost to welcome the break in their routine and were soon exchanging stories about the adventure. Dyami mimicked the others when he was around them, but when he lay on his bed trying to sleep, all his fears returned. Sometimes he started from his sleep, suddenly terrified that the walls of his room would fall in around him.

He had always felt safe inside the domes, whatever lay outside. The domes had been built at some distance from the nearest cliff, where boulders might be loosened, but they could withstand falling rocks in any case. Bartai had taught him enough about the domes for him to know that they would remain secure even during the most severe quakes. None of this kept him from imagining that the west dome might be breached, leaving the settlement vulnerable to Venus's deadly air, sulfuric acid rain, and crushing atmospheric pressure.

The patrol volunteers did their best to reassure the children. The deaths and most severe injuries in Oberg were largely, so they claimed, the result of human carelessness. Heavy equipment had been improperly secured, or people had not pruned potentially dangerous tree limbs near their houses, or neglect during construction had resulted in the collapse of a wall or roof. It was a lesson for the children to heed. Their lives depended on maintaining what was around them and anticipating possible hazards.

Everyone, even the children, had to be alert to anything out of the ordinary. The volunteers implied that this meant paying attention to anyone who might be acting strangely, as well as to installations and equipment.

The volunteers encouraged the children to talk about any lingering fears, but Dyami refused to confess any of his. Ishtar's people seemed to be everywhere. Someone wearing the sash always seemed nearby to reassure a household about an injured family member or to help out in other ways. Those in Ishtar moved through Oberg, secure in their faith, untouched by fear.

*  *  *

A private message from Bartai arrived ten days after the quake; Dyami decided to view it in his room. He found out then why he had not seen her anywhere; she had gone to Island Three the day before the quake, without telling him.

"Please understand, Dyami." The strong-boned face that reminded him of Risa's wore a look of concern. "You knew I was leaving, and I thought it'd be best this way. Saying farewell in person might have been more upsetting to you — farewells can be hard. Your family didn't want you to get too attached to me, and I have to respect that — I also didn't want to cause you trouble by having you visit or by coming to your home."

You don't want to cause yourself trouble, he thought; that's what you really mean. You couldn't even make a call, you had to send a message.

"But I'll remember you," she continued. "I'll remember that a boy in Oberg tried to be a friend to me, at least as much as he was allowed to be. Maybe someday we'll be able to meet as true friends. Farewell."

The screen went blank. He should have expected it; Habbers, after all, weren't people like him. Chimene claimed that Habbers had hidden designs on their world. He doubted that any of them cared enough about Cytherians to engage in such plots. They could always leave; he would be here forever.

He left his room and wandered down the corridor. Irina, her brown braid down her back, was sprawled on the floor of the common room, reading a book on her screen. "Bartai's gone," he said. "I just looked at her message."

Irina looked up. "From the Platform?"

He shook his head. "Island Three."

"I guess she's still waiting for a ship then."

"Unless she already left," he said bitterly.

"You knew she was going. You shouldn't spend so much time with Habbers anyway. Chimene says —"

"I don't care what she says."

Irina scowled. She seemed ready to start one of her arguments with him when Risa entered the house with Eleta. "You're home early," Irina said.

"Keep an eye on Eleta," Risa replied. "I have to call Tina."

"Anything important?" Irina asked.

" I don't know yet. It might only be rumors." Risa frowned. "I don't want any of you children to leave the house right now."

She went to the wall screen, sat down, and pressed a button on the console near the floor. "Bettina Christies," she muttered, "at the infirmary. If she isn't available, leave a message telling her to call me as quickly as she can."

Dyami moved closer to his mother. Her voice was that low and deliberate only when she was worried. The screen lit up; a large image of Bettina gazed into the room.

"I hear there's been an outbreak of some kind," Risa said quickly. "Alasid said something about it at work."

The physician nodded. "I may as well tell you now. Gupta and a couple of the other physicians are speaking to the Council, and they'll be making an announcement before dark. We don't want panic, but we have to act."

"What is it?"

"Some of our patients are displaying a disease something like pneumonia, but it's much more severe and rapid in the way it progresses. The Island physicians have already told us that a few pilots on the Platform have come down with the fever, and it's spread to at least two of the Islands."

"But how —" Risa began to say.

"Two of our patients here were among the most recent group of immigrants from Earth. They were the first to show the symptoms. That group of immigrants was small — a few of them are here, and the rest went to Tsou Yen and Kepler. The physicians there have already reported other cases among those settlers and a couple of the pilots who transported them."

"It doesn't seem possible," Risa said. "They would have been scanned before they left Earth. Surely —"

"I doubt they were scanned on the Platform," Bettina responded. "Maybe Earth's become as careless as we are, or maybe they picked it up somehow aboard the Habber ship that brought them to Anwara — there are a couple of cases there, too."

"Are you saying that the Habbers —"

"I'm not saying anything — there are enough wild rumors already. I'll stick to the facts. We're dealing with a myxovirus — we found that out almost immediately, after checking some blood samples. It's a particularly vicious myxovirus — the earliest symptom is a slight feverishness, followed by difficulty in breathing and fluid in the lungs. The patient barely has time to become aware of the symptoms before the body temperature rises and it becomes nearly impossible to breathe. To put it simply, the body's literally burning itself up and the patient can't get enough air. Before we can even make an opening in the trachea and get the patient on a breather, it's nearly too late, even if we had enough breathers for everyone. The disease runs its course in a day or two."

"It can't be," Risa muttered. "I've never heard of such a thing."

"Well, we've got it now." Bettina's thin face sagged; she rubbed at her eyes. "Two patients are dying already — we can't replace what their bodies are burning up. Our facilities were already strained by patients injured during the quake. We've got one patient who seems to be fighting it so far — he might recover. But this virus is a mutation the medical researchers haven't seen before, and it's deadly — it's almost as if it were designed to be as deadly as possible." The physician brushed back a lock of her disorderly gray hair. "I shouldn't say that, I suppose — I've been hearing too much wild talk about those who might be interested in attacking us this way."

Dyami glanced at Irina. Her pale eyes were wide.

"Surely you can stop it," Risa said.

"Oh, yes. The medical people down here and on the Islands are already trying to produce enough RNA and interferon to vaccinate everyone — anyone who hasn't been exposed would be protected then, and some people are bound to be immune or have a higher resistance. The researchers are also working on an antibody that could help those already infected. Oh, we have the means. The trouble is that we don't have the time. We have over eighteen thousand people in Oberg alone to deal with, and no way of knowing who's been exposed already without scanning them all right away. We've traced the infection's probable path, but we can't know about everyone who might already have had contact with someone who's infected."