2312

Kiran and Lakshmi

The next time he was passing through the Cleopatra train station, Kiran called the number Swan had given him, and the call was picked up by Lakshmi herself. When he explained how he had gotten the number, she gave him directions to a noodle house near him and told him she would be there in an hour, and she was. She turned out to be a Venusian native in the classic mold—tall, dark, handsome, taciturn. Her combination of Chinese ancestry and Indian name resembled that of some others he had met; he had been given to understand it marked Venusians who wanted some separation from the old country, with the name being a way of saying they were more Venusian than Chinese.

“Don’t stop working for Shukra,” Lakshmi told him immediately, even though Shukra had left him in a state of xuanfu (drifting chaos). She would help him to get to cuo suo. (Both meant “place,” Kiran’s translation belt told him, but suo was one’s own place, meaning also his work unit.) She would give him a better assignment, which would involve serving as a courier in his travels, moving things and information from one xiaojinku to another. Xiaojinku, small gold-storage centers: this sounded good to Kiran. He agreed to do it. Only then did Lakshmi tell him that he would be paid in yinxing gongzi, invisible wages. That didn’t sound as good, but something in the way she said it made him think it would be all right.

At the end of her description of his new job, Lakshmi stared at him. “Shukra got you from Swan Er Hong, but he did not use you. Does he think you are stupid? Or maybe Swan? Or me?”

Kiran almost said, Maybe Shukra is the stupid one, but Lakshmi did not actually seem to expect him to reply. She got up and left, and an hour later he had a new ID number, thus a whole new identity and name. None of which seemed to matter to anyone. His first assignment from Lakshmi was to courier a small packet from Cleopatra back to Colette; he was to fly back, to get there faster. With the packet, Lakshmi gave him a pair of translating glasses, which looked like thick old-fashioned black spectacles, with speakers in the earpieces. “Better translator,” she explained.

So he booked a flight, and in the process found that his new identity had quite a number of credits—so many it was a little scary. But interesting too, to see what kind of resources Lakshmi commanded. Maybe a whole xiaojinku, or more than one. People in his old work unit had said she was in the Working Group, and the Working Group ruled the planet.

Certainly her translator glasses were an upgrade; when he looked at Chinese language signs, with all their intricate ideograms, he now saw them overlaid in glowing red with the words rendered in English. It was startling to discover just how much information was written into the cityscape, now in glowing red: Beware of the Three Withouts. Vote for Stormy Chang. Towering Mountain Beer. The Door in the Middle of Half the Sky Alterations. A gender clinic, apparently. One could also Give Father a Second Sister.

Then he was off on a plane, then up above the turbulent clouds, into the permanent night under Venus’s sunshield. Only starlight illuminated the cloudtops below. Being in a jet reminded him of Earth. Out the window Earth itself made for a bluish double star overhead, with Earth twice as bright as Luna, the two together jewel-like and a little bit heart-stopping. Then the clouds below cleared, and he could see broken chopped jumbled ridges—the Maxwell Montes, apparently. They formed a giant mountain range, Venus’s Himalayas.

In Colette he gave Lakshmi’s packet to a person who approached him at his lodge entrance, and two days later the same person came by and asked him to take another packet to Cleopatra, on another flight.

Back in Cleopatra Kiran went up to the promenade running around the crater circumference just inside the dome, as instructed. Snow flowed down the outside of the dome in a perpetual avalanche. The packet was to be taken to point 328 on the dial of 360 degrees that divided the rim promenade. He found that the rail on the promenade was numbered as if in an arena concourse. The person waiting for him at 328, a small of indeterminate gender, spoke in Chinese. “We are the night runners of Bengal, very important work,” Kiran’s glasses translated out loud, causing a smile from the speaker, who apparently understood English; the glasses must have said something funny, but Kiran didn’t know what it was. “Tell me more about that,” he said quickly, and the small led him to a nearby bar.

Kexue (Science) sat on the bar’s edge while Kiran sat on a stool, and for a couple of hours Kiran listened to stories muttered in his ear by his glasses, stories that made little sense to him but were interesting anyway. They were part of a project, Lakshmi was a goddess, Science had once kissed her foot and almost electrocuted humble self; one could not touch the gods, but only obey. When they parted, Kiran got Kexue’s number and a promise to get together again.

His run back to Colette, with another packet, was to be on the ground this time, in a dedicated rover. He found he was only honorary pilot at best of this squat rover with six wheels, as it ran by AI. It was pretty fast, humming over a road of crushed rock and hard-packed gravel and passing enormous mining trucks with deft lane changes. The cab of the rover tilted backward, it seemed from the weight in the freight compartment behind. The freight had not been identified for him, but there was a dosimeter clicking steadily away on the dash. Uranium, maybe? The packet Kexue had given him was not sealed, and he checked in it, hoping this action would not be detectable, and saw that he was carrying a number of handwritten notes. Their Chinese letters scrawled like drunken calligraphy and were surrounded by little sketch drawings of birds and animals. His glasses overlaid the letters with red words:

Only he who has eyes can see.

In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Seemed like codes to him. Whether the messages were personal or official, important or routine, he could not know. At one point his glasses had translated Kexue as saying that to circumvent both Shukra and the qubes, Lakshmi was being forced to keep to just a word in the ear. Maybe these notes were part of that. Things were very, very unclear at the top, Kexue had said.

“Like in China?” Kiran had asked.

“No,” Kexue had said. “Not like China.”

Back in Colette, Kiran gave the packet to the same person outside his lodge door, then rejoined his work unit and spent a few weeks back on the ice, then got another call from Lakshmi and went to Cleopatra to get another packet. That happened quite a few times, with nothing in particular to distinguish each instance. As Kiran continued to live with his work unit in Colette and perform work associated with Shukra, he supposed he might have accidentally become some kind of mole or double agent, but he couldn’t be sure. He would have to call on Swan for his defense if anyone got annoyed. One day he found out by accident, when pushing his translation glasses back up on his nose, that they would translate with the red words floating on the lenses from spoken Chinese as well as written ideograms. This was a great discovery, and helped him both to learn faster and to stay in the game while he did learn. Red writing plastered over the visible world—it could be disconcerting, but it was so nice to have things explained at last. He kept it on more than off.

So, message packets and the occasional radioactive rover were couriered by him back and forth over the Spine of Ishtar. Looking at the map, Kiran saw that the giant high plateau that dominated the western half of Ishtar (and would that be the Shoulders of Ishtar or the Butt of Ishtar?) was named Lakshmi Planum. He didn’t know if this was a coincidence or an allusion. He had to wear a personal dosimeter, and the millisieverts clicked on up. It was lucky that the longevity treatments had good mutation repair therapies!

He made many drives alone, and the AIs on board the squat rovers were simple indeed. The translator glasses were turning out to be much like a dog, attentive but predictable. He had never liked dogs, but in the struggle to understand his situation, he had to like this one.

In Cleopatra, after his meetings with Kexue, he would go out in search of the loudest bars he could find. Down one alley he heard English being sung, an entire group singing “The Ballad of John Reed,” and he almost ran down the street to make sure they would not somehow disappear. But it turned out to be just a song bar, with lots of bad beer and bad jokes and only a few people who spoke English. He met a woman there nevertheless, Zaofan (Rise in Rebellion), and went with her back to her room, and when they resurfaced from their dive into sex, back to the world of speech, and began to talk in the darkness before the city dome’s artificial dawn, she mentioned that she too worked for Lakshmi. Kiran felt a quick pulse of fear—it seemed more than a coincidence. He asked her some questions, very cautiously, and after a while her stories made it seem like half the people in Cleopatra worked for Lakshmi, so possibly their meeting had been a coincidence after all. Which would be nice; he didn’t want to be involved in any plots he didn’t understand. On the other hand, he did want to be involved in plots that he did understand. That would represent progress. So he began to hang out at the song bar, and between his spectacles and the people there who spoke some English, and once or twice some Telugu, he talked to a lot of people. He would sit between a Uighur and a Vietnamese and they would be using English to communicate with each other, their English mangled to the point of poetry, but comprehensible. He would bless the British and American empires and soak in every phrase.

He stuck by his friend Zaofan when he could find her, and from her and her unit found out more about Lakshmi. Lakshmi was one of the Working Group, everyone agreed. She didn’t like Shukra; she didn’t like China. In fact no one knew of anything she liked. There were rumors that in Indian mythology, Lakshmi was an avatar of Kali the death goddess—or maybe it was vice versa—no one knew for sure. Their Lakshmi was said to be hermaphroditic, and went through lovers like a black widow. You did not want to have her attention fixed on you. She had lived all over Venus in her youth, and some said ran a Beijing protection racket during her sabbaticals, under the nom de guerre Zhandhou (Do Battle). Shukra was in big trouble—“He’ll be sanwu before it’s all over, you’ll see. Or maybe even four withouts, if she castrates him too!”

Apparently Lakshmi had wanted to eject Venus’s frozen carbon dioxide at an angle into space, a process that over time would have speeded up Venus’s rotation and made for a natural day. That plan had been turned down in favor of the big sequestration, but as she was such a power in the Working Group, there was always the possibility that the policy might someday change. Who knew? The Working Group was a tight secretive little club, prone to fits of enthusiasm and sudden faction. Most of the people in the song bar felt it was a dangerous force, not at all interested in ordinary Venusians except insofar as they were useful to the terraforming. In other words, same old China! China 2.0! Chinaworld! The Middle Kingdom Relocated Closer to Sun! Therefore the Inner Kingdom! They had a lot of names for it.

Some in the bar said all this was an exaggeration and a cliché. Here they were in the song bar, after all, and out there doing great things every day, therefore part of the story of Venus, no matter what people said about government—but much laughter and shouted scorn greeted these sentiments. Obviously most in the bar felt they were only helpless observers of a giant drama going on above their heads, a drama that was eventually going to suck them down into its maelstrom, no matter what they said or wanted. Better therefore to drink and talk and sing and dance until they were stupid with exhaustion and ready for a stagger through the early-morning streets, Kiran following Zaofan to her slot on the matrazenlager of her work unit. After a few repetitions of this Kiran was accepted as part of her work unit’s lodge, which was nice.

One time he was coming back into Colette when it seemed to him that someone was watching him, and when he noticed this, the person began to close on him. A big man, and his quick glance revealed to Kiran the existence of another person behind Kiran. Immediately Kiran bolted into one of the jammed alleyways and jinked through the back of an open-front shop, causing an uproar that he hoped would delay the people following him. After that it was a matter of dashing as hard as he could, deeper and deeper into the maze of circular alleys that made up Colette’s downtown. Zigzagging often, he hurried to Lakshmi’s little Colette office and drew himself up before the security person at the front desk with aplomb. “Here to see Lakshmi,” he huffed. The security person’s eyebrows shot up his forehead and instantly there was a gun pointing at Kiran’s face.

It took a while for Lakshmi to get over to Colette, and in that time the guards didn’t want him to leave the office. It was pretty much like being under arrest, but when Lakshmi arrived, she seemed pleased with his escape.

“There’s a closed building under the rim at 123 in Cleopatra,” she said when he was done with his story. “Move to Cleopatra, stay with your friend there, and just float for a while. See if you can figure out how many people go in and out of that building per day. I think Shukra’s trying to set up a xiaojinku in my town.”

“Does that work like a hawala?” Kiran asked.

Lakshmi did not acknowledge that he had spoken. She left and then Kiran was free to go.

So the next time he was in Cleopatra, Kiran floated. He went across the city into the 110 district, where the radial boulevards were less frequent and the buildings often industrial in size and purpose. The bars were correspondingly bigger as well. He went into one near the 123 facility and sat near the slot where the bartender gave drinks to the waiters. He turned on his translation glasses and stared forward like he was watching something on them, slurping bad beer and reading the translation of the voices around him.

They’re too beautiful, it’s a mistake.

Lakshmi wanted them that way.

Shhh! She who must not be named!

But Kiran could hear them laughing. The glasses did not print out in red Ha Ha Ha! as in a comic book; he wished they would.

After an evening of listening to bar patrons he stood around for a while in the street, took a cable car up to the rim promenade, and walked above the neighborhood in question, looking down casually. He had his spectacles record the conversations going on around him. Later that night, back down near the city center, he sat in a corner table of a bar and played verbal translations of what he had recorded, hoping he had caught some security people talking. “She has to stop this, it’s too much.” But another one was not happy to hear this: “We work for Big Pears, just do it.”

Kiran kept replaying the spectacles’ recordings and translations, trying to get the hang of the Chinese tones as well as ponder the sense of the scraps of talk. There was “a man from Shanghai,” it seemed. Nánrén husheng. This seemed to be a man of importance. Shanghai was inundated, he thought. Maybe it was another code phrase. There was a song in the song bar: “My home was in Shanghai—now it’s underwater—I came to Venus because I did not want to live with the fishes—but now here I am, and it’s wetter than the bottom of the sea—and full of sharks! Goodness gracious!”

The word “they,” tamen, seemed to refer to the Working Group, or some other powerful force behind the scenes. “They” want this, “they” will do that. The Working Group was definitely opaque from below. It was either elected or appointed; no one knew which. There were supposedly about fifty people in it. Some people said it was like the tongs back home, others that they had found their method in the pre-Han ways, or even from the lost Iroquois League of North America.

Zaofan and her unit were full of more stories, told in snatches when out in the streets. Lakshmi was working with others, including Vishnu (naturally), also a Rama and a Krishna. Taking an Indian name was compared to cutting off your queue during the Qing dynasty. So if the people doing this were in the Working Group, what did that say about Venus-China relations? No one was quite sure.

Vishnu and Rama appeared only at meetings held at the Cleopatra spaceport, so possibly they came from off-planet or were traveling a lot. Krishna lived on Venus, but in Nabuzana, a canyon city on Aphrodite. Once Kiran was called into Lakshmi’s room when Krishna was visiting her, or so Zaofan told him later when he described the visitor, who had not been introduced or said a word.

Shukra’s new building at Cleopatra 123 (if that was what it was) was tightly secured, with a small population living in it full-time, judging by food shipments in and recycling shipments out. Kiran spent a fair amount of time in the neighborhood, wandering around watching the place, sometimes from the rim promenade. Lakshmi’s people also had several closed buildings in Cleopatra, Kiran was learning, so perhaps she felt that Shukra was horning in on her territory by doing the same.

Then one day he went back to Zaofan’s lodge in Cleopatra and found their section of the matrazenlager was occupied by an entirely different group of people. Zaofan was gone, Strength of Nation, Great Leap—all the little group that had taken him in. The lodge manager said they had left together after getting a call from somewhere on Aphrodite. The manager shrugged. This was the way on Venus, the shrug said. People got their working orders and moved as a unit. If you weren’t part of the unit, it wasn’t any of your affair; you were xuan, left hanging.

“No!” Kiran cried aloud. “Zaofan!” He had laughed with these people, he had said their names in English and they would laugh!

The new crowd on the matrazenlager turned their backs to him until he was ready to talk.

After that they introduced themselves, and as he could tell them where the good bars in the neighborhood were and things like that, they folded him into their crowd in much the same way the earlier one had. Still he felt changed, and was reserved with these people as he had not been with the first group—or really they had been the second, now that he thought about it. It was going to keep happening, he could see. You could only give yourself so many times.

The lodge manager, with whom he had become friendly, saw that in him. “Don’t think that way or you cut yourself off! You can give yourself as many times as there are chances to give. It’s not something that runs out.”

“It hurts too much when people go.”

The manager shrugged. “Attachment is fruitless. Release and move on. Your cuo is your suo.”

Your place is your-place. A lodge keeper’s philosophy. But every building on Venus was a lodge. Or every building in the solar system.

Meanwhile this new group had some people in it who also worked for Lakshmi, down at the new seacoast being built in the south. They were building cities in advance of the ocean, which was still falling every day as snow. Sea level was going to be a high-stakes game for years to come, with any number of players involved. There was even a futures market of sorts devoted to it, in that you could place bets on the height sea level would ultimately attain. The range being bet on was apparently pretty wide—over two vertical kilometers, which horizontally meant huge stretches of land. Deals in the Working Group or even back in China were apparently being made, broken, remade; new directives followed one after another. Great masses of dry ice that were still not sequestered were being shoved around; then abruptly the shoving would stop, leaving dikes like contour lines on a map, curving all over the dim white landscape. This stuff had to get buried before temperatures rose any higher, or else it would evaporate back into the atmosphere and poison them all. Terraforming, they said, was becoming a murderous business.

All this was news to Kiran, and the next time he saw Lakshmi he told her about his new lodge team, and asked if he could join them the next time they made a trip down to the coast. She shook her head at first, then frowned, then agreed to it.

“Just go down there and see the town, learn the layout. I’ll let you know if I want you to courier anything there.”

So he joined his new team for a rover trip down to Vinmara. On the way down the enormous south slope of Ishtar, they passed another new town that was being built with a harbor on its empty downhill side; then they drove down some giant hairpin turns and descended at least another thousand meters, maybe two, before coming to Vinmara, also being built as a harbor town. This struck Kiran as indicating a pretty serious dispute over the future sea level, but his new team scoffed at the town they had passed as a futile statement, one that would have to install a swimming pool to front its harbor when the time came.

Vinmara itself was being more grown than built, it looked like, as it was made mostly of bioceramics, scalloping in rounded stacks around a waterfront. The seaside promenade or corniche would anchor an urban district, ringing the bay of the ocean that would someday be there. Above and behind the waterfront curve the city rose steeply to a backing ridge, already being covered with seashell shapes mostly white or beige, then trimmed with pastel blue in the Greek style.

“This is Lakshmi’s work, this town?”

Yes, it was a project of her part of the Working Group.

“And someone else is building that harbor town back up the slope?”

Yes, that was Shukra’s people’s town. They were fools and idiots.

“But don’t they know how high the ocean will go?” Kiran asked. “I mean, the water’s already up there in the atmosphere, right?” Gesturing briefly at their eternal blizzard. “Why wouldn’t the models get it right?”

His teammates shrugged. One or two were giving each other looks that indicated to Kiran that this question needed to be added to his Unsolved Mysteries of the Solar System file. It was a big file. One of the mates finally said, “There are choices to be made. Some basins flooded or not flooded.”

They took him to a sidewalk café backing the new seawall, overlooking another little marina standing over black rock. Each round table of the café had its own umbrella, despite the bigger umbrella of the tent over the whole town. They were almost the only ones there, at first; then others began to trickle in, and a trio of guitarists set up and began to play, after which people started dancing. Party in a dry marina, in a night-dark storm by an empty sea. The heat lamps were on, and if you danced long enough, you could even warm your feet up. Kiran kept dancing with someone from his new unit, a young woman—yes, the old male-female magnetism still the most reliable guide to sex, as far as Kiran was concerned; and he could see variants of that being acted out all over the dance floor. Actually it was often hard to tell who was what, and this gal in fact was half a meter taller than he was, and pretty masculine and assertive at that, and in response Kiran was ready to melt like a girl who wants to get pregnant that very night. Whatever! He liked looking up at her face!

He tried talking. “Lyánhé? Shengren syingyu?” Union? Stranger sexual desire?

“Syin pengyu syingyu,” she said, mocking him.

New friend sexual desire, his spectacles wrote on the world in red. Even better!

“Tyauwu,” she ordered him. Dance.