2312

Wahram on Venus

Wahram was in the city of Colette, trying to get at least some of the Venus Working Group to support the plan to intervene on Earth; also to ask certain Venusian friends for help in Genette’s plan to deal with the strange qubes. Neither project was going particularly well, even though Shukra seemed willing to help; but he wanted help in return, in dealing with his local conflicts, and Wahram didn’t see how that could be done. More would be needed from the Mondragon and Saturn both if they were going to entrain any of the Venusians in the upcoming Terran effort.

Then during a welcome break in the negotiations there was a knock at the conference chamber door, and Swan came in. He was shocked to see her, and shocked again when she saw him, strode across the room, crashed right into him, and struck him on the chest with the back of her fists. “You bastard!” she exclaimed, not very quietly. “You lied to me, you lied!”

He stepped back, hands up, looking around for a place to retreat where the conversation could continue a bit more privately. “I did not! What do you mean!”

“You went to the Vulcanoids and made a deal with them and you didn’t tell me about it!”

“That isn’t lying,” he said, feeling like he was splitting hairs, but it was true, and gave him time to back out into a passageway, then around a corner, where he could stop and defend himself: “I was down there doing my job for the Saturn League, it was nothing to do with you, and you have to admit we are not in the habit of sharing our complete work schedules with each other. I haven’t seen you in a year.”

“That’s because you’ve been on Earth, making deals there too. Which you didn’t tell me about either. What did you tell me about? Nothing!”

Wahram had been worried about this, had ignored the problem and done his job; but now here it was, the reckoning. “I was away,” he said feebly.

“Away—what’s away?” she demanded. “Look, were you in the tunnel or not? Were we in the tunnel together or not?”

“We were,” he said, putting his hands up in defense, or protest. “I was there.” I wasn’t the one who claimed not to be there, he didn’t say.

In any case she had stopped and was staring at him. They stared at each other for a while.

“Listen,” Wahram said. “I work for Saturn. I’m the league’s ambassador to the inner planets, doing my job here. It’s not—it’s not something I can automatically share. I do it in a different sphere.”

“But we just suffered an attack and lost our city right down to the framing. We need to keep what gifts we have to give. And part of that was light.”

“Those were not useful amounts of light. The entirety of what you could send from Mercury meant little around Saturn. With the Vulcanoids it’s different. They can send out enough to make a real difference. We need it for Titan. So, I’m charged with arranging that. It’s like bidding for futures shares. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it myself. I guess I was… I was afraid. I didn’t want you mad at me. But now you are anyway.”

“Even worse,” she assured him. But now she was piling on, he saw, for the theater of it. He played to that:

“It was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I’m a bad man.”

That almost made her laugh, he could see. “Fucking bastard,” she said instead, continuing her play. “The stuff you did on Earth is even worse anyway. You cut a deal with the rich nations of Earth, that’s what it comes down to and you know it. Which is a disgrace. There are people down there living in cardboard shacks. You know how it is. It’s always that way, and it looks like it’ll go on forever. So they’ll always hate us, and some will attack us. And we pop like soap bubbles. There’s no solution but justice for everyone. It’s the only thing that will make us safe. Until then some group will always conclude that killing spacers is the only way to get our attention. And the sad thing is that they may be right.”

“Because now you’re paying attention?”

She glared at him. “Because the situation down there has gone on too long!”

He tilted his head side to side, trying to figure out how to say what he felt. He walked her down the passageway a little farther, to a long table covered with little cookies and big coffee tanks. He poured them cups of coffee. “So… to protect ourselves, you’re saying, we have to orchestrate a global revolution on Earth.”

“Yes.”

“And how? I mean, people have been trying that for centuries now.”

“That’s no excuse to stop! I mean here we are on Venus, on Titan, out here doing everything. There are things that could work down there. Spread something through their cell phones. Give them a stake in the Mondragon. Build housing or do land work. Make it that kind of revolution, one of the nonviolent ones. If something happens fast enough they call it a revolution whether guns go off or not.”

“But the guns are there.”

“Maybe they are, but what if no one dares to shoot them? What if what we did was always too innocuous? Or even invisible?”

“These kinds of actions are never invisible. No—there would be resistance. Don’t fool yourself.”

“So all right, we press on against resistance, see what happens. We’re resource rich, and we’re growing a lot of their food. We have the leverage.”

He thought it over. “Maybe we do, but they play by their rules there.”

She shook her head violently. “There’s a gift economy in people’s feelings that precedes all the rules. Set one up and people give themselves to it. And we have to do something. If we don’t, they’ll shoot us down. They’ll kill us and eat us.”

Wahram sipped his coffee, trying to slow her down. She had gone too far, as always. He would like to hear what Pauline would say about all this, but there was no way he was going to be given access to Pauline at this moment. Swan had seized up the cup he had poured for her and slurped it down, then started lecturing him some more, emphasizing her points with the coffee cup so that he was going to be lucky not to have it poured on him.

And in fact, though she was going too far, as usual, she was also expressing things Wahram had been thinking himself. Really, it was just another articulation of a point that Alex had been making for years. So he seized a moment when she was catching her breath and said, “The problem is that what’s needed to be done has been clear for centuries now, but no one does it because it would take a very large number of people to enact it. Construction work, landscape restoration, decent farming, they all take huge numbers of people.”

“But there are huge numbers of people! If the unemployed were mobilized, there’s your numbers. The revolution of full employment. The place is trashed, they’re cooked, they need to do it. In effect Earth needs terraforming as much as Venus or Titan! In fact it needs it more, and we’re not doing it.”

Wahram thought it over. “Could it be sold that way, do you think? As a restoration? Appeal to the conservatives as well as the revolutionaries—or at least confuse the issue as to what is really happening?”

“I don’t think we need to be confusing.”

“If you are clear about your intention, Swan, there will be opposition. Don’t be naïve. Any change will be opposed. And by serious opposition. I mean violence.”

“If they can find the way to apply it. But if there’s no one to arrest, no one to beat back, no one to scare…”

He shook his head, unconvinced.

Swan was pacing around him like a comet around the sun; Wahram rotated to face her. Twice she rushed him again and beat him on the chest with the hand not holding her coffee cup. Their voices crossed in an antiphony that anyone listening would have heard as a duet for croak and cheep.

Finally the dissonant duet came to an end. Swan was winding down at last. She had just arrived on Venus, it was clear, and was beginning to yawn despite the coffee. Wahram sighed with relief, shifted the timbre of his voice to something calmer, changed the subject. They stared out the window at the falling snow, blown by a hard gale into frolic architectures plastered over everything. This world, so new and raw, still emerging, told them with great whacks of wind: things were changing.

Wahram considered Alex’s two unfinished projects: to deal with Earth; to deal with the qubes. He felt a shiver, as suddenly it seemed to him that these projects were becoming parts of one thing. Very well, but it would take real craft to pull them together; it would take some cleverness in the execution. And Swan was going to keep getting mad at him until he helped to make it happen. But he thought perhaps he could.