Venus of Shadows (6 page)

There was some justice to her words. Her daughter, Iris Angharads, had left the North American Plains for the Cytherian Institute. Benzi knew that Iris had never expected to be chosen for advanced training at the school; she was sixteen and already pregnant with him when the news came. Iris couldn't have refused the honor; even Angharad had seen that.

Iris had left her home town of Lincoln soon after Benzi's birth. She had become little more to Benzi than a screen image after that; Angharad and her household had cared for him. The mother who returned shortly before his fifth birthday was a stranger, one who had come there only to take her son to the Cytherian Islands.

Iris had claimed that more opportunity awaited them both with the Project. The Plains Communes were households of women who tended their farms and often had children in their teens, choosing fathers for their young from among the workers who passed through their towns. Plainswomen scorned bonds; each might welcome many men to her bed, but none would tie herself to one man. Many Plainswomen were illiterate and had little desire for learning; they preferred to dwell on their people's glorious past. Had Benzi remained with Angharad's household, he would, he supposed, have become yet another wandering Plains mechanic, a man who moved from town to town and shared his bed with any woman who was willing. He would have had no real home in the communities Plainswomen controlled.

It was a wonder his mother had escaped. Iris, he knew, had suffered the mockery of her household while pursuing her lessons; she had even flouted custom by secretly pledging herself as a bondmate to Liang Chen, Benzi's father. At most, she had hoped to leave Lincoln with Chen to join the Project as a worker; she had not thought the Institute would choose her.

Benzi had been afraid to leave his grandmother, but anticipating his journey to Venus had dulled those fears. Now he recalled the warmth and affection Angharad had always shown him, and how she had wept when Iris took him away. His bond with Iris, despite his mother's efforts, had always been more tenuous.

"Your line will continue on Venus," he said. "Your descendants will be part of a great enterprise." Angharad had always given in easily to what she called the sin of pride; such dreams might console her a little.

"If your sister Risa ever finds a man," Angharad muttered. "She's in her twenties, and no sign of a child." She shook her head. "I don't understand you, Benzi. You abandoned the Project, and now you're back on Earth, helping those fools in that camp to get to the place you left."

"Pilots are needed, and it's a chance to try to overcome Earth's distrust of us. I've lived on Earth and the Islands, so I was a logical choice to come here."

"Everything's changing now," she said, "and I wonder what will come of it. Your cousin Sylvie is head of this household now, and she's thinking of having us merge with another household. There are fewer households now — we don't need to farm as much land. Our ancestors found a wilderness here long ago and made it their home, and now much of it may become a wilderness again."

"Angharad —"

"But I've said enough about that." She went on to speak of her housemates, LaDonna and Constance, both old women now, and of the new generations living under her roof; Benzi nodded absently as she gossiped about the town's mayor. "She's a good enough woman, I suppose," Angharad said, "but I don't mind admitting that she sometimes benefits from my advice. Frankly, I think I was a better mayor — you wouldn't have seen me walking around with such airs. I remember when you used to come to the town hall while I was meeting with people — you were so solemn, even then — the mayor's assistant, they used to call you." She paused. "And has the life you chose made you happy?"

"I suppose so." He mentioned a few of his friends and told her of some of the difficulties he once had in adjusting to his Link. There was much about Habber life she would not comprehend, much he didn't quite understand himself.

"I shouldn't be speaking to you," Angharad said when he was finished, "but I'm old now, and the chance might not come again. I don't like what you've done, but you'll have to live with that, and God and His Holy Mother will judge me for my sins soon enough."

"I'm happy we had the chance to speak, Grandmother."

"God be with you, Benzi, and Mary's blessings upon you." Her mouth twisted. "Unless you Habbers have no God."

"Farewell."

The screen went blank. Benzi leaned back in his chair. Angharad might think of him as a Habber, but even now, he often wondered if he would ever truly be one.

He had been in his teens when he fled the Islands of Venus with a few other pilots who had dreamed of shedding their bonds with Earth and its Project. He had kept his plans secret from his mother and father; he had even hurt them by severing his familial bond with them formally, in the hope they would thus be spared any blame for his actions. He had been sure of his decision then; he had viewed Earth as a dying civilization refusing to let go of its children.

His actions, and those of his accomplices, had forced the Island Administrators to expel most of the Habbers from the Islands in response to their deed. That had set the Venus Project back, which in turn had eventually led to the Islanders' confrontation with Earth. His mother had died trying to prevent one mad group from destroying one of the surface domes, but she had saved the lives of several Habbers there; that, as much as anything, had convinced the Habbers to push Earth into a face-saving settlement.

Had it not been for his and his fellow pilots' deed, Iris might still be alive, living on the world she had given her life to build.

Few Earthfolk grasped the Habbers' motivations for assisting the Project. Even the Islanders, many of whom had grown closer to the Habbers there in recent years, did not fully understand their purpose. The Project provided the Habbers with their only direct contact between themselves and the people of Earth; it was their last link with the rest of humanity.

Benzi thought of the Habitats near Mars and just beyond that planet's orbital path. Habbers had made homes for themselves inside the two Martian satellites and had built others using the resources of the asteroid belt; the location of their worldlets had established their claim to Mars. Terraforming Mars would have presented fewer problems than transforming Venus, but the Habitat-dwellers regarded planets in much the same way as some ancient Earthfolk had seen their Earthly environment. To make use of some planetary resources was acceptable; to alter a world completely was unnecessary and undesirable. Habbers lived in space; they had no need to make other planets into replicas of the Earth they had abandoned.

Long ago, Earth had been gently but firmly warned that the Habbers would not welcome efforts at terraforming Mars. The Nomarchies might have looked to the satellites of the gas giants then, but any settlements there would be farther from Earth and its influence. That left Venus, Earth's sister-planet. The obstacles to terraforming there were great, but that would only make Earth's eventual triumph more glorious. The Habbers had established no claim to Venus; there was only one Habitat orbiting the sun between Venus and Earth, built before an agreement with the Nomarchies limited the Habbers to the space near Mars and outside the red planet's orbit. As long as Earth allowed them that small outpost in the part of the solar system the Mukhtars claimed for themselves, the Habbers were content to let Earth proceed with its Project. Later, when Earth turned to them for help, the Habbers had readily agreed. They had not been able to stop Venus's transformation, but could learn much from assisting the Venus Project, whatever their own doubts about the wisdom of that effort.

The Habbers feared cutting themselves loose from the rest of their kind, yet already many of them had begun to diverge. Benzi had never visited the Habitats near Mars and beyond, but those who came to his Habitat from there seemed as distant and alien to him as they would have been to a citizen of Earth. They wore human shapes, but their minds, Linked to the artificial intelligences of their own worlds, were as engineered, molded, and shaped as their Habitats. These Habbers had shed their earlier passions and surges of irrationality, erased their cluttered memories of decades or centuries after storing them in the cyberminds, had made themselves what they once aspired to be — a society of mind, links in a vast intelligence. He often wondered how much of themselves they had given up; some of them seemed hardly more than the eyes and ears of cyberminds.

He had joined the Habbers to be free of Earth, but he was still bound to Earth's people. His home was the one Habitat between the orbits of Venus and Earth. Those who lived there saw themselves as a bridge between Earthfolk and the rest of their own kind. He had dreamed of someday exploring the stars beyond this solar system, but the people of his Habitat feared such a break with all that they knew, while the Habbers near Mars thought only of probes, of exploring space only through cybernetic intermediaries.

He and his fellow pilots had planned their escape flight carefully. They had chosen the perfect moment, the hours when the gravitational engines on Venus's equator would release their pulse of energy. The nearest Hab, with an orbit nine million kilometers beyond Venus's orbital path, was within reach of a shuttle at that time. Benzi and his comrades had volunteered for Platform duty, knowing that nearly everyone on the Islands would be gathering by their screens to witness the awesome events below.

Probes transmitting from the planet's surface had given the Islanders images of crumbling mountains, hills swaying on molten lava, pyramids crowned by lightning as Venus was assaulted. Few had paid attention to the shuttle as it left the port and began to orbit Venus, ostensibly to view the world from above. Benzi remembered the bright fan of colored bands that had suddenly appeared above the northern pole as the dark world below began to turn more rapidly. That had been his last glimpse of Venus before the shuttle thrust out of orbit.

He had arrived at an asteroid enclosed by a vast metallic shell. The Hab was a world of wide corridors, simple rooms, and a garden of forests, lakeshores, hills and plains at its center that seemed meant to be a monument to Earth. Its people were individuals whose strongest passions were apparently directed toward knowledge and speculation. He saw them not as inhuman, but rather as people whose true humanity had triumphed over qualities that were usually linked to his species' baser instincts.

Benzi avoided thinking of Iris and Chen during his earliest years in the Hab. They had their dream and he had his; their lives could no longer touch him. News of the Project's setbacks had left him unconcerned, since he was beginning to think as Habbers did, to see most events as little more than transitory stages in a long life. The Project would need more Habber assistance again; eventually Earth would allow more Habbers to return. He had forgotten that Islanders, with briefer lives, could not be so patient. Iris's death had reminded him of that.

He had given up his life on the Islands. He could never have remained happily in those gardened environs or lived on the surface, where the dark clouds would always have hidden the heavens from him. Iris could live in her dream, seeing Venus as it would be; he had seen only a prison. He was free now, but could still not think of himself as a Habber. By his own choice, the Link inside his head that connected him with his Habitat's cyberminds was often silent.

The guilt he felt over his mother's death separated him from many of his fellow Habbers. Iris had once represented everything he was trying to escape, so driven by her own dream that she was unable to see his. He had escaped from her, but now she held him once more; he was aiding others who shared her dream. He had sought to shed a little of his remorse by agreeing to ferry settlers from this camp outside Tashkent; he wondered if he would ever be free of that guilt.

*  *  *

Four Guardians sat in the small room at the base of the tower; they were hunched over the table, playing a game on a portable screen. They fell silent as Benzi stepped out of the lift. The uniformed people spoke to him only when it was necessary and muttered about him when they thought he was out of earshot.

The Guardians had various assumptions about Habbers, many of them contradictory. The Habbers were here to spy on Earth; they were here because they secretly longed to return; they had altered their bodies somatically to the point where they were hardly human, or else their rational, distant manner was only the pose of people pretending they were different. Habbers dreamed of conquering Earth, sabotaging the Venus Project, or of abandoning near-space altogether. Whatever the Guardians believed, they also seemed to think that the Mukhtars now had the upper hand in their dealings with the Associated Habitats and were using the Habbers for their own ends.

None of the Guardians here knew that Benzi had spent his early life on the Plains of North America and had grown up on Venus's Islands, and that was just as well. He preferred being seen as an odd creature in human form rather than as a traitor to the Nomarchies.

The door slid open as he walked outside. Dawn had come; in the camp, lines of people stood outside the dining halls, waiting for their morning meal. The Mukhtars, he admitted to himself grudgingly, were handling this situation in a fairly rational way. The camp's primitive conditions and the impossibility of knowing when one might be allowed to leave discouraged most of those who might otherwise have come. Earth could rid itself of a few potential troublemakers while ensuring that those who got to Venus would be strong, determined, and willing to work for that world. Fear of losing a chance to emigrate kept the camp relatively quiet; the confiscation of nearly everything the hopeful emigrants owned made it possible to run the camp more economically. It might have been wiser in the long run to treat these people more kindly, thus gaining their loyalty and gratitude, but that would only have encouraged too many others to join them.

Benzi sometimes pitied the people in the camp, but at least they were aware of the price they would pay to reach their goal, something he had not known when he joined his life to the Habs. The would-be emigrants did not harbor kindly feelings toward him; they assumed that any delays were partly the work of the Habbers, and the Project Council let them believe that.