2312

Swan and Kiran

Taken in by what turned out to be an Interplan ship; cleaned up and fed; slept for twelve hours straight; up and eating again; and after that they were in Venus orbit, and then in a landing craft. The craft fell like a brick to the still-shaded planet, then eased off at the end to thump onto a runway. When they emerged in the big atrium of the spaceport, Swan could see that they had landed outside Colette. There was a view to a rumple of snowy muscular hills to the north, all dim under swirls of dark cloud. Venus!

What had happened in raw space still bulked large in her mind, so that what stood before her eyes now was like a dream. She was separated from Wahram as they went through their medical checkups and then a long security postmortem. The people talking to her were upset; it was obviously necessary to attend to the moment, transparent though it was. Later she could mull over what had happened and what she felt about it. She did not want it to slip away like everything else.

Their hosts brought her a little feast in dim sum style, with tiny plates and morsels of food, no more than a mouthful each, or just a taste, each with a different sauce, until her palate was completely confused, and she felt stuffed after four bites. Her stomach rebelled; it grumbled and queased throughout the conversation that began at the end of the meal.

Many there were drinking liquor and opioid mixers. Swan sipped soda water, watching people carefully. The Venusians there were looking very subdued. A leavening of jokesters, clustered mostly at one table, laughed at the gurneys of food, but the rest looked chastened, even grim. The salvation of the sunshield was all very well, of course, a great victory to be sure. But their defensive systems had failed them, and the danger inherent in the sunshield had been emphasized for all the world to see. Disaster had been staved off this time, but it still hung over them like a sword: a terrible fate, perpetually forestalled by a thing no stronger than a venetian blind, or a circular kite on a string.

One particularly grim part of the room was absorbed in the problem of what had happened to the sunshield’s security; these people were poking at their tabletop’s graphs and talking rapidly to each other. It appeared most of them thought the failure to respond had been caused by an inside job. Wahram rolled into the room in a wheelchair and joined them, his left leg held straight out and swathed in white. He nodded slowly as they spoke to him. Once he glanced over at Swan, as if he had just heard something she would find interesting; then he was deep in it again. Swan would hear about it later, she hoped. Although then it occurred to her that he might feel he had to tell them about her telling Pauline about the group Alex had assembled when she had promised she wouldn’t. How else was the story of what had happened going to parse? Well, in the end her rash act had saved Venus. Not that that meant she wouldn’t suffer for it anyway. Be known as a completely untrustworthy reckless flibbertigibbet qubehead. It wouldn’t be that hard of a case to make.

She sat watching the Venusians. They stayed slumped in their chairs, depressed. She asked some questions and they answered, except sometimes they didn’t.

She came back to something they didn’t seem to want to address: “I suppose you have to stick with the sunshield, now that it’s there?”

One waved a hand impatiently. “Some say no, that we should change.”

“What do you mean? Wouldn’t that take spinning the planet up to some kind of day-night?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“The only way there is,” one said. “A heavy meteor shower at a tangent.”

“The very late heavy bombardment,” someone called from the jokesters’ table.

“But wouldn’t that wreck the surface you have?” Swan said. “Blast away the foamed rock, the CO₂, the atmosphere—everything you’ve done?”

“Not everything,” the first one said. “We’d just keep hitting the same spot. Things would just be… disarranged.”

“Disarranged!”

“Look, we don’t like this idea. We’ve fought this idea of spinning it up. We all have.” Gesturing around the room at the others there. “But Lakshmi and her crowd have been arguing it could work without too much disruption. Just one more short deep ocean trench, and ejecta to the east of it. Other areas would suffer too, especially around the equator, but not so much that we would kill the bacteria we have out there now. And it wouldn’t release more than a couple percent of the buried CO₂.”

“But wouldn’t it take a few hundred years of heavy bombardment to get the spin you wanted?”

“The idea would be to spin it to about a hundred-hour day. We think most Terran life-forms can tolerate that. So it would only take a hundred years.”

“Only a hundred!”

A new voice: “What these people are arguing is that we did it too fast the first time.” This particular speaker, an old person, eyes alive in a weathered face like a mask, sounded a little regretful, a little disgusted. “Did it too much like Mars! Took the way of the sunshield because it was fast! But once you have it, you have to keep it. You depend on it. And now people can see what could happen to it. So Lakshmi will win. The vote will go for bombardment now.”

“In the Working Group, you mean?”

“Yes. We’ll have to stay in shelters, or even retreat into sky cities, or even go back home for a while. Wait until things calm down again.”

Wahram, who had rolled over and joined them, said, “But what will you bombard it with this time? You won’t be taking any moons and cutting them up.”

“No,” the old one said. “That was part of the going too fast. But there are many Neptunian Trojans to be sent down.”

“Aren’t the Tritons developing those?”

“There are thousands of them. And they are all Kuiper belt captures. We could replace from the Kuiper belt, if the Tritons want. So nothing need be lost as far as Neptune is concerned. The Tritons already agree to the principle.”

“Well,” Swan said, baffled. She didn’t know what to say. She regarded their faces, so grim and irritated. “Is it what the people here want? Can you tell?”

They looked at each other. The first said, “There’s a network of cadre layers, like the panchayats in India. And everyone is talking. There’s only forty million of us here. So—the Working Group will hear from us and from everyone. But in fact the idea was already gaining traction. Now with this thing, people see the need. Lakshmi has won.”

Later, when Swan was alone back in her room at the hospital, there was a tap at the door, and in came Shukra with Swan’s young friend from Earth, Kiran. She greeted them happily, immediately cheered by the sight of their faces, so vivid and real. Shukra, whom she had worked with a million years ago; Kiran, her newest friend—now they had the same look on their faces, serious and intent. They sat down by her bed and Swan poured them glasses of water.

“Listen to the youth here,” Shukra said, tipping his head at Kiran.

“What?” Swan said, alert to trouble.

Kiran put a hand up as if to reassure her. “You told me when you brought me here that there were factions. That’s turned out to be true, and it’s even kind of a little underground civil war, you could almost call it.”

“Lakshmi,” Shukra said heavily, as if this would explain everything. “He got involved with her.”

“Is that bad?” Swan asked. “I mean—I’m the one who told him to try her.”

Shukra rolled his eyes at this. “Swan, you were here a hundred years ago. You should know that things have changed since then. Tell her,” he said to Kiran.

“I started moving stuff and carrying messages for Lakshmi,” Kiran said, “and Shukra saw that was happening, and got me to look closer into what I was seeing when I did things for her.”

“He was bait,” Shukra said with a hard smile, “and she took it. But probably she knew he was bait.”

Kiran nodded, with a look at Swan that seemed to say Look what you got me into here. He said, “There’s a new coastal town that Lakshmi’s team is developing, it’s definitely her place, and it’s set too low for some reason. People thought she might want it drowned later on for an insurance scam or something like that. Anyway, they’re doing something funny in that town. I think maybe they’re making androids or something. Robots made to look like humans, you know?”

“I do know,” Swan said. “Tell me more.”

“There’s an office there that was closed off, a pretty big building. I saw a box of eyeballs get delivered there. I think they might be putting together artificial people. Some kind of Frankenstein factory.”

“You saw that?”

“The guard I was with opened a box, and it was eyeballs. He didn’t like it that I saw, so I had to get to teacher Shukra here, and ask for help.”

Shukra nodded as if to say this had been a smart move. Swan said to him, “So this place he was at is Lakshmi’s?”

“Yes,” Shukra said. “Her work units built the whole town. So look—I don’t know anything about this Vinmara operation, but she’s got people coming into Cleopatra that we can’t ID. I set up an office in Cleopatra myself, it’s supposedly an open city, although really she calls the shots there. I was trying to figure out where these new people were coming from. But now—when I heard about the attack on the sunshield, the first thing I thought was, Well, isn’t that convenient for friend Lakshmi. People will be scared into supporting the plan to spin up the planet, and if we do that, the new hole they’ll rip in the equator will shrink the reach of the ocean accordingly. These places like Vinmara, that are set too low? They won’t be set too low.”

“Ahh,” Swan said. “Wow. But—what about the Chinese?”

“The Chinese hate this second bombardment idea, and so if it happens anyway, despite their opposition, they lose leverage—again, all the better for Lakshmi. And in truth none of us want Beijing telling us what to do. So this also helps her in the argument.”

“And so these humanoids she’s having built?” Swan leaned forward and clicked on the table screen. “Here—show me where this Vinmara is on a map. Let’s get Inspector Genette in here, and Wahram too. They’ll be very interested to hear what you have to say.”

Inspector Genette arrived in her room, then Wahram, wheeling himself along in his wheelchair, his left leg swathed in its medwrap. They listened to Kiran’s story and then sat pondering the implications.

Inspector Genette said, “I think we need to decide some things before we act on this. After what’s happened, I’m quite sure that I need to execute the plan we have been devising, which I have not yet described to you, Swan. So if you will agree to turn off Pauline again, I can tell it to you.”

Swan wasn’t sure she wanted to go through that again, and the inspector must have known by now that she had told Pauline what had been said at the last off-the-record meeting, so she didn’t see the point.

But in any case she was forestalled, because Wahram now said to Genette, “I’m afraid we should perhaps go through with the plan without Swan knowing about it at all. She may turn off Pauline for the conversation, but she may then tell her qube what happened after she turns it back on, as she did the last time we did this.”

Swan gave Wahram a dagger of a look and said to Genette, “It was Pauline who informed us of the attack in time to do something about it. And it was Wang’s qube who set up the new surveillance system able to detect that pebble mob. So you can thank me for that later. But my point is, whatever these Venusians are up to with their qube people and their plots, there are other qubes who are clearly on our side. We need to be working with them!”

Inspector Genette agreed. “I’ve had a long talk with Wang and his qube, and what you say is true. There are factions among the qubes too, I’m afraid.”

“So we need ours informed!”

“Maybe,” Genette said. “Although which are ours is an open question. And in this case, the fewer that know, the better. So look, with this information from Kiran, I am going to proceed with this particular Interplan operation as planned.”

“And that is?” Swan said pointedly.

The inspector’s little face, as beautiful and curious as a langur’s, regarded Swan with a bright smile. “Please let me tell you about it after we are farther along.”

Swan gave Wahram another black look. “You see what you’ve done.”

Wahram shrugged. “The plan needs complete secrecy to work. Even I am ignorant of the details.”

“I should also add,” Genette added quickly, “that my plan also needed this information from your young friend here. So it is just now coming together. Please allow me to make the next move confidentially. Even Wahram, as he says, and really everyone here on Venus”—bowing toward Shukra—“is ignorant of our next step, and it has to be that way to succeed.”

Whether Genette was just helping Wahram to look better in Swan’s eyes, Swan couldn’t tell; she was too furious to keep a good sense of the nuances of the situation. Her judgment was off. Genette was now talking to a colleague who had come into the room, finally turning to the rest of them and saying, “If you will excuse us.”

“I will not,” Swan said, and stormed out.

Wahram caught up with her down the hall and matched her step for step, rolling along in his wheelchair and capable therefore of keeping up with her no matter how fast she walked.

“Swan, don’t be angry at me, I needed to tell the inspector what happened to stay in good faith on an important matter; this operation is delicate and the whole situation had to be told.”

“So now it is.”

“Yes, and soon you’ll know everything too. But for a while you have to trust us.”

“Us?”

“I’m going to help the inspector. It shouldn’t take too long. During that time I hope you will go back to Terminator and talk with your people there, about the situation on Titan and about us.”

“You think I’m still interested in any of that?”

“I certainly hope so. It’s more important than your bruised feelings here, if you will allow me to say so. Especially as they needn’t be bruised. I think considering you and Pauline as an indivisible pair is a good thing, don’t you? It’s accurate, it describes you better, let us say. You are a new thing. And most especially to me, I might add.” He reached out and clutched her hand, then stopped them both by braking his wheelchair with his other hand. They slewed around, and he held on to her hand even though she tugged on it. “Come on,” he said, “be serious. Were you out there marooned with me or not? Were you in the tunnel or not?”

Turning her question around on her; and of course she remembered. “Yes, yes,” Swan groused, looking down.

“Well then, here we are now, and there is a situation that requires confidentiality, and so in that context you have to see what I just said to Genette as being under the light of utmost necessity. Especially given my own feelings for you, which are”—he paused to pound his chest with his wheel hand—“profound. Confused but profound. And that’s what matters. It makes life interesting. So I have been thinking that we ought to get married, in the Saturnian crèche I am already part of. It would solve so many problems more than it would create that I really think it is the best thing for both of us. For me, certainly. So I am hoping you will marry me, and that’s the long and short of it.”

Swan yanked her hand away, raised it as if to hit him. “I don’t understand you!”

“I know. I have trouble with that myself. But that’s not the main thing. It’s only part of it. We would make that part of our project.”

“I don’t know…” Swan began, then trailed off: there was so much that could follow this opening that she found herself at a loss. She didn’t know anything! “I’m going to Earth, anyway,” she said mulishly. “I have a meeting there with the UN mammals committee; we’re making some progress there. And now I want to talk to Zasha too.”

“That’s all right,” Wahram assured her. “You think about it. I have to go join Genette; we really are engaged in something urgent, and this information from Kiran is the linchpin, so let us complete that, and I’ll come see you wherever you are, as soon as I can.” And after an anguished clasp of hands to heart, he swiveled and wheeled back down the hall to the inspector.