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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAMELA SARGENT

  “Sargent is a sensitive writer of characterization rather than cosmic gimmickry.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “One of the genre’s greatest writers.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Pamela Sargent is an explorer, an innovator. She’s always a few years ahead of the pack.”

  —David Brin, award-winning author of the Uplift Saga

  “Over the years, I’ve come to expect a great deal from Pamela Sargent. Her worlds are deeply and thoroughly imagined.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “Pamela Sargent’s cool, incisive eye is as sharp at long range, visionary tales as it is when inspecting our foreground future. She’s one of our best.”

  —Gregory Benford, astrophysicist and author of Foundation’s Fear

  “If you have not read Pamela Sargent, then you should make it your business to do so at once. She is in many ways a pioneer, both as a novelist and as a short story writer. … She is one of the best.”

  —Michael Moorcock, author of Elric of Melniboné

  “[Sargent is] a consummate professional [who] exhibits an unswerving consistency of craft.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  Alien Child

  “An excellent piece of work—the development of the mystery … is well done. Ms. Sargent’s work … is always of interest and this book adds to her stature as a writer.”

  —Andre Norton, author of the Solar Queen series

  “Count on Pamela Sargent to write a science fiction novel that is both entertaining and true to human emotion. I wish I had had this book when I was a teen because all the loneliness, all the alienation, all the apartness I felt from my family would have made more sense.”

  —Jane Yolen, author of The Devil’s Arithmetic and Cards of Grief

  “This story of Nita, a girl growing up in an insulated environment where she gradually comes to realize that she might be the last person left on Earth, has conflict and suspense from the beginning. … Vividly depicted.”

  —School Library Journal

  “This finely crafted work never falters with false resolution. … An honest and compelling examination of ‘What if …?’”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An engaging narrative in Sargent’s capable hands. An essence of otherworldliness is present in the gentle guardians, and since Sven and Nita are raised solely by the two aliens, there is a freshness in their perceptions of their own species. … Clearly and simply presented—thoughtful—a worthy addition to any SF collection.”

  —Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)

  “Sargent does not lower her standards when she writes young adult fiction. Like the best of young adult writers, her artistic standards remain as high as ever, while her standards of clarity and concision actually rise. … The intelligence and resourcefulness she showed in The Shore of Women are undiminished in Alien Child.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “Thoughtful, serious, and written without condescension, the novel contains all of the qualities we have come to expect from this author.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  The Golden Space

  “Pamela Sargent deals with big themes—genetic engineering, immortality, the ultimate fate of humanity—but she deals with them in the context of individual human lives. The Golden Space reminds me of Olaf Stapledon in the breadth of its vision, and of Kate Wilhelm in its ability to make characters, even humans in the strangest forms, seem like real people.”

  —James Gunn, writer and director of the film Guardians of the Galaxy

  “Clearly, The Golden Space is a major intellectual achievement of SF literature. It will not be possible for any honest story of immortality hereafter to ignore it; it is a landmark.”

  —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Brilliantly handled—all of us have got to hand an accolade to the author.”

  —A. E. van Vogt, author of The World of Null-A

  “Sargent writes well, the many ideas are fresh, and their handling is intelligent to the extreme.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “What next, after universal immortality becomes a fact of life? Pamela Sargent’s brilliant book, The Golden Space, shatters the imaginative barrier that has held stories about immortality to a simplistic pasticcio of boredom, degeneration, and suicide.”

  —The Seattle Times

  The Mountain Cage

  “[Sargent] is one of our field’s true virtuosos, and in The Mountain Cage: and Other Stories she gives us thirteen stunning performances, a valuable addition to a repertoire that I hope will keep on growing.”

  —James Morrow, author of Only Begotten Daughter

  The Shore of Women

  “That rare creature, a perfect book.”

  —Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game

  “A cautionary tale, well-written, with excellent characterization, a fine love story, as well as much food for thought … An elegant science fiction novel.”

  —Anne McCaffrey, author of the Pern series

  “Pamela Sargent gives meticulous attention to a believable scenario. … A captivating tale both from the aspect of the lessons that the author tries to impart and from the skills she has used to tell it.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “How many perfect science fiction novels have I read? Not many. There are at most three or four such works in a decade. Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women is one of the few perfect novels of the 1980s. … Her story of a woman exiled from a safe high-tech city of women, the man ordered by the gods to kill her, and their search for a place of safety, is powerful, beautiful, and true.”

  —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “A compelling and emotionally involving novel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “I applaud Ms. Sargent’s ambition and admire the way she has unflinchingly pursued the logic of her vision.”

  —The New York Times

  Ruler of the Sky

  “This formidably researched and exquisitely written novel is surely destined to be known hereafter as the definitive history of the life and times and conquests of Genghis, mightiest of Khans.”

  —Gary Jennings, bestselling author of Aztec

  “Scholarly without ever seeming pedantic, the book is fascinating from cover to cover and does admirable justice to a man who might very well be called history’s single most important character.”

  —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, anthropologist and author of Reindeer Moon

  Child of Venus

  “Masterful … as in previous books, Sargent brings her world to life with sympathetic characters and crisp concise language.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Child of Venus

  The Venus Series: Book Three

  Pamela Sargent

  To George

  there for the long haul

  Contents

  Log Entry

  Ishtar Terra

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Islands

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  High Orbit

  Chapter 15
<
br />   Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  The Garden

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  The Heavens

  Chapter 26

  Home

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  About the Author

  From the personal record of Mahala Liangharad:

  One of my earliest memories is still vivid enough that I can call it up at will, even though it was a simulated experience and not one I actually lived through myself.

  No unprotected human being could have survived it.

  I am standing on a wrinkled plain of black basalt, feeling the intense heat that surrounds me and presses in around me and an atmospheric pressure that threatens to crush me. In the distance, against a dark red sky, sits a pyramid so vast that it dwarfs even the shield volcano I glimpse in the distance. There is so little light that I can see only in the infrared; I wait, knowing what will happen, excited by anticipation and fear.

  And then the ground heaves under my feet, and the sound of thunder strikes my ears with such a blow that I cry out in pain. A web of bright light appears along the pyramid’s black sides as lightning dances at its apex. The ground shudders again, more fiercely this time, hurling me up into the clouds, and as I fly up, the planet below me begins to turn more rapidly. I can see it moving beneath me as I hover; the pyramid below me sweeps past as the planet turns, and after that the bright glow of the erupting volcano, and the wind screams at me as my world tears at itself.

  This was a depiction of an event that happened long ago, nearly a century before I was born, on the world that was to become my home.

  I try to remember when that world was no longer the imperfectly comprehended and often mysterious background of my young life, when it first became clear in my mind. Occasionally, I have the feeling that my environment was always in the foreground, that there was always some understanding on my part of what my world was and how I came to be in it, but that has to be an illusion. The time when I was beginning to discover my environment, exploring my surroundings and seeking out the place I might occupy in them—much of that is clouded for me now, as if I were viewing it through a heavy veil. Much of it is lost.

  Lost to my own unaided memory, I mean, and not as easily recalled as things that happened to me later. AH of the past is preserved in some form; I simply can’t recollect it very easily by myself. I can no longer recall even whether my earliest apprehension of my world came from my actual experiences and the conclusions I drew from them or from the simulated events of a mind-tour, and maybe drawing such a distinction is irrelevant now. Those experiences have all become part of my past.

  As a child, along with everyone else I knew, I often enjoyed the sensory entertainment of a mind-tour. By putting my band around my head, reaching out to our cyberminds, and asking for a particular tour—those that I was allowed to call up, anyway, those that had no barriers to block access—I could travel into the past, participate in an adventure, climb Mount McKinley or the Matterhorn or one of the other mountains of Earth, go diving in the sunken cities of Venice and Miami, ride a horse, shoot a bow, or else move like a ghost through other times and places, untouched by any of the visions that I observed.

  The most common of these mind-tours, ones that had been shared by nearly everybody around me, were various depictions of how people had come to live on our world, depictions framed by dramatic and often apocryphal scenes. There were the obligatory scenes of the Earth after the end of the last of the Resource Wars, scenes showing the white-robed figures of the first Mukhtars, the inheritors and new rulers of humankind’s ruined home planet, wandering through the rubble-strewn streets of Damascus and Tashkent and Samarkand and the other great cities of the New Islamic Nomarchy that was soon to become the center of Earth’s culture. There were the moving scenes of Karim al-Anwar, one of those early Mukhtars, gazing out at a great sea with a visionary look in his intense dark eyes as he imagined creating such a body of water on inhospitable Venus, of making a new home for humanity.

  At this point, some of the mind-tours would place the viewer amid a group of Mukhtars, all of them nodding their kaffiyeh-clad heads as Karim spoke eloquently of his dream of terraforming Venus; others would sweep the mind-tourist into a panoramic view of the dark tesserae of Venus, expanses of bizarrely wrinkled land veiled by thick clouds of carbon dioxide, and then to a view of Baltis Vallis, the longest of the many long, thin channels that meandered for thousands of kilometers over the Venusian surface, channels that had all of the appearance of ancient riverbeds and deltas. In the first such mind-tour I can recall experiencing, I felt extreme heat and a pressure that seemed great enough to crush me, while a low voice reminded me that an unprotected human body would be crushed by a barometric pressure ninety times that of Earth’s atmosphere. In another, I flew over a blue-green ocean toward the burgeoning green jungles of the landmass of Aphrodite Terra—a vision of Venus as it would be.

  Such mind-tours always inspired me with awe and pride, as they were intended to do, for I grew up as one of the Cytherians, as we called ourselves, one of the children of Venus. My childhood’s Venus was no longer the hellish planet that Karim al-Anwar had dreamed of transforming, but it had also not yet become the green and fecund world he had hoped to bring into existence. We lived on the surface of our world, but only in domed settlements, gardens that were protected from the harsh and still lethal environment of Venus. We lived there in order to stake a human claim to that world, but a heretic might have said that we were prisoners, living out our lives in those enclosed places solely to habitable, whatever the obstacles that lay ahead.

  Some believed that Karim al-Anwar had easily won the support of his fellow Mukhtars for the terraforming of Venus, while others thought that it had taken most of his life to inspire them with his dream. Over six hundred years had passed since his death, so there was much that the adults who taught me and the other children in my settlement did not know about him, many parts of his life that remained hidden. But Karim had lived to see Earth’s Nomarchies finally at peace, and each of those regions ruled by a Mukhtar, with a peace guaranteed by the armed force known as the Guardians of the Nomarchies. He had also seen that Earth needed a new dream, one that would inspire Earth’s people.

  The mind-tours considered appropriate for children gave little indication of any motive for Karim’s ambition other than a desire to dedicate himself and the people of Earth to the service of a great project, a desire fueled by his fear that Earth, with its rising oceans, steadily increasing average temperatures, and increase in levels of carbon dioxide, might eventually have great need of the knowledge terraforming would yield, in order to repair the damage to its own biosphere. Only later did it become evident to me that Karim and many other Earthfolk also saw his Venus Project as a way to challenge the Associated Habitats.

  The Habbers: That was what the people of Earth called them, the descendants of those Earthfolk who had abandoned a planet that they saw as a worn-out husk, who had fled from the aftermath of the Resource Wars into space instead of staying to rebuild their damaged Earth. The Habbers: The term had begun as an insult and a curse, but over time it lost its sting and became only another name for the Habitat-dwellers.

  The earliest Habbers had made their first homes inside the two satellites of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, before going on to construct larger Habitats using hollowed-out asteroids and all of the resources the solar system offered. They had been content to leave the wounded world of Earth to others, to build a new human civilization away from the surface of the home world. That was another reason for Karim’s dream, the fear that without a great enterprise to inspire the people of Earth, humanity’s future might belong entirely to the Habbers. And because the Habbers had in effect staked their own claim to Mars, preferring to keep that pla
net in its natural state as an object of study, Karitn could not hope to transform the Red Planet. Venus would have to become a second planetary home for humankind, and the focus of his hopes.

  Anwara, the satellite that circled Venus in a high orbit, had begun as a place to house the Venus Project’s earliest scientists and workers and eventually grew into a vast ringed space station. The giant shield of the Parasol, constructed by thousands of Earthfolk at the cost of many lives, became an umbrella of immense fans with a diameter as great as that of Venus; in the shade of this giant metallic flower, Venus had slowly grown cooler. Frozen hydrogen from Saturn was hurled toward Venus in tanks, so that the hydrogen would combine with Venus’s free oxygen to form water. The Cytherian atmosphere was seeded with new bioengineered strains of algae that fed on the poisonous sulfuric acid and expelled it as iron and copper sulfides.

  One mind-tour that I viewed in childhood conveyed the misleading impression that our surface settlements had been built not long after the construction of the Islands. In fact, the Islands had come into existence centuries before there were any settlers living inside domes on the high Maxwell Mountains of the Ishtar Terra landmass. The ten Islands where scientists and workers were to dwell, and an eleventh to be used as a port for both the dirigibles that carried people between the Islands and the shuttlecraft that traveled to Anwara, began as platforms built on rows of gigantic metallic cells filled with helium. Ten of the Islands were covered with soil and then enclosed in impermeable domes. These Islands floated in Venus’s upper atmosphere slightly north of the equator; it was expected that in later centuries, as they slowly dropped through the altered atmosphere, they would come to rest on the planet’s terraformed surface. In one mind-tour, I sat with the pilots of an airship as they left the

  Island port we called the Platform, bound for Island Eight; I gazed at sensor readings that told me of the fierce winds that raged below the Islands. In another mind-tour, I flew on a shuttle toward the rings of the great space station of Anwara.