Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories Read online

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY PAMELA SARGENT

  Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2000, 2003, 2004, 2012 by Pamela Sargent

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  All three of my Venus novels were dedicated to George Zebrowski, who gave me essential editorial and moral support while I wrote them, so this collection is dedicated to him as well.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Introduction: Dreaming of Venus” and the “Afterwords” are published here for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Venus Flowers at Night” was first published in Microcosms, edited by Gregory Benford, DAW Books, 2004. Copyright © 2004, 2012 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Follow the Sky” was first published in Space Stations, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW Books, 2004. Copyright © 2004, 2012 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Dream of Venus” was first published in Star Colonies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW Books, 2000. Copyright © 2000, 2012 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Utmost Bones” was first published in Envisioning the Future, edited by Marleen S. Barr, Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Copyright © 2003, 2012 by Pamela Sargent.

  The above stories are reprinted here by permission of the author and her agents, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 171 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021.

  INTRODUCTION: DREAMING OF VENUS

  Sometime during the early 1970s, the idea of writing a novel set on the planet Venus came to me. I can even recall where I first had the idea; I was sitting on the porch of the old Victorian house where I was renting an apartment, had just finished a game of chess with a friend who lived down the street, had been reading Carl Sagan’s speculations about the possibility of terraforming Venus, and had an impulse to write a lengthy and profound family saga along the lines of Thomas Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks. I’d already had the experience of writing a novel that was something of a family saga (my first novel, Cloned Lives, which was published in 1976), but this time wanted to write about several generations of a family.

  I might have set such a story on an invented planet, but that didn’t appeal to me; why make something up when the solar system already offered a variety of fascinating settings? And the scope of a terraforming project—decades, most likely centuries, of efforts to make an inhospitably world habitable by humankind—required a story that would have to encompass generations.

  From the start, I unconsciously realized that trying to write such a novel would take some time and demand a long-term commitment. I didn’t foresee that the one long novel I first imagined, Venus of Dreams, would grow into three massive tomes, require almost twenty-five years of writing and rewriting (about half of my adult life by the time the third volume, Child of Venus, was published in 2001), and eventually need successive agreements with four different publishers in the U.S. alone to get all of the volumes into print. I contracted with Pocket Books for the first book, Venus of Dreams, had that contract cancelled shortly before Pocket’s Timescape science fiction imprint was discontinued in the early 1980s, sold a trilogy including Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Child of Venus to Bantam, saw Venus of Dreams published in 1986 and Venus of Shadows in 1988, had the Bantam contract abruptly cancelled while I was in the middle of writing the third volume in the early 1990s, and finally sold the orphaned Child of Venus in the late 1990s to HarperPrism, a division of HarperCollins, which brought it out under the Eos imprint acquired by HarperCollins after it took over William Morrow and Avon. The entire trilogy is now available, in both print-on-demand trade paperbacks and electronic editions, from E-Reads (http://ereads.com/).

  This winding and uncertain course of publication put me through much stress, depression, and soul-destroying angst; had I known what lay ahead, I would have abandoned Venus of Dreams the day after the idea first occurred to me. But writers often sense that the writer is only a device for a story or novel to get itself written, and that what happens to the writer doesn’t much matter to the story. The Venus novels got themselves written, and that the process took as long as it did was partly because of the immensity of that task, partly because of broken promises by publishers, and partly because life does go on, and there were other things (including other books and stories) demanding my attention during those years.

  I might have set my generational saga on Mars instead of Venus, but enough masters of science fiction had used Mars as a setting to make me feel I should head toward relatively unexplored fictional planetary territory. (Kim Stanley Robinson had not yet embarked on his masterful trilogy about the terraforming of Mars, nor had Greg Bear written Moving Mars, but H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, C. S. Lewis, Robert A. Heinlein, and legions of other masters had already dealt quite well with the Red Planet, and Joe Haldeman has recently inhabited it for his novel Marsbound.) Venus also offered opportunities for female imagery and for using the hellish environment of Venus, with its runaway greenhouse effect, to make some points about the increasing climatic threats to our own planet. But I didn’t expect, a decade after the last Venus novel was published, to feel as though I am now living through the early stages of the future history that I invented for those novels.

  I got lucky with some of that future history. I call it luck because carefully considered futuristic extrapolations and forecasts have a lot less to do with my writing than instincts, unconscious processes, and often feeling that using one detail rather than another will make for a better story. Because I had read Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik’s book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, I assumed that the Soviet Union would have fallen apart sometime before the beginning of Venus of Dreams, a novel that begins some five hundred years from now. I was vague about when this fragmentation took place (a good rule for science fiction writers is: know when to be vague) and by the time I traveled to Russia, after Venus of Shadows was published, the Soviet Union’s disintegration was already under way and I could congratulate myself for being prescient.

  Another notion that appealed to me was creating a future Earth dominated politically and culturally by Muslims. This had less to do with extrapolating a possible future and more to do with my desire to create a future that felt connected to our present and our past while also being convincingly strange and different. A story or novel for me almost always begins with a character (sometimes more than one character) trying to tell me a story. The character who began speaking to me when I first thought of writing Venus of Dreams was a young woman in North America trapped among the well-meaning but ignorant members of her family, with apparently no way out and no way to become part of the effort to terraform Venus. Only after I had written about her, and had completed a rough early draft of the novel, did I begin to get a fuller picture of her world. This future Earth was made up of nomarchies, provinces with a certain amount of cultural individuality and political autonomy but dominated by a council based in the Middle East and largely made up of Muslims. It seemed reasonable to assume that people there and in remnants of Russia and the East might pick up the pieces of an Earth ravaged by climate change and earlier conflicts that I called the Resource Wars. I didn’t lay out the background of my novel, the future history, charts of governmental and Venus Project hierarchies, maps, a chronology, and all the rest until I’d finished that first draft, which is normal for me even if it seems to be doing things in the wrong order. I have to let my characters clue me in, and only then can I dig into the details of their histories and cultures.

  Given this backwards way of w
orking, I’ve found myself surprised that I seem to have done a better job of prognosticating than I thought possible. The future history of climate change, diminishing resources, failing educational systems (most of the people in the Venus books, those who are not among the elite who have gained their power through the control of both resources and information, are illiterate or close to it), mosques dotting the American landscape (accompanied unfortunately by a rabid xenophobia that I hadn’t anticipated), deepening political divisions, and diminishing expectations is rushing upon us more quickly than I envisioned, and I am not at all convinced that it will lead to a terraforming project like the one I imagined or indeed to a promising or sustainable future.

  But I can hope.

  I was sure that I was finished with the Venus terraforming project and also any fiction even slightly related to the trilogy once Child of Venus was written (I estimate that the published novels contain some 750,000 words), but as I’ve said, stories will get themselves written however they can. The stories in this book were not part of the Venus trilogy, but were written after I had finished Child of Venus, when characters and stories existing in the interstices of the novels began to speak to me. These are stories that can stand alone outside that context, but I hope that they will allow some readers to revisit those books and perhaps others to discover them.

  ―Pamela Sargent

  Albany, New York

  December 30, 2011

  VENUS FLOWERS AT NIGHT

  The escarpment to his northeast was the sheer face of mountains taller than the Himalayas, a range of peaks sustained by the upwelling of Venus’s mantle. Karim gazed up at the vast wall of the cliffside. Masses of dark gray clouds hid the top of the escarpment, but patches of mossy green were visible against the black and gray face of the cliff. To the west, a pale glow could be seen behind the thick clouds; the sun was rising.

  The scarp was the southwest side of the Maxwell Mountains. To the north lay the high plateaus of the land mass of Ishtar Terra. Life, although precarious, had already come to the cliffs; soon people would travel to the Venusian surface to live in the enclosed settlements of the high plateaus.

  No, Karim thought, and the cliffside disappeared.

  Now he stood on a rocky shore, looking out at a wrinkled gray ocean. In the east, the setting sun was no more than a smear of white light against the thick gray mist of the sky; another month would pass before it disappeared below the horizon. No birds flew above this shore; no life lived in this sterile and acidic sea.

  No, Karim thought again, and the gray ocean vanished. He lifted his arms and removed his silver linking band from his head.

  He sat in the small room that adjoined his sleeping quarters aboard the Beverwyck. The floor rocked almost imperceptibly under his feet. He would have preferred a large hovercraft, or perhaps an airship, for this journey, but Greta had insisted on hiring the Beverwyck. The small watercraft’s functions were controlled by an artificial intelligence, so its crew of three would be all they required, meaning that he and Greta would have more privacy. Greta also believed that the citizens of North America’s Atlantic Federation would be more reassured by a visiting Mukhtar who was traveling slowly upriver in a simple vessel and spending time at places along the way, instead of speeding past towns and villages in a hovercraft or floating above them in an inaccessible airship, stopping only to talk with the occasional high official.

  “You have to show some sensitivity and respect,” Greta had told him. “Many of the people in my home Nomarchy still haven’t forgotten what their place once was in the world.”

  Karim al-Anwar usually heeded his wife’s advice on such matters, having learned that her political instincts were often superior to his own. But he suspected that Greta also preferred a journey aboard the Beverwyck because that would allow her more proximity to the places of her childhood. Greta Gansevoort-Mehdi had grown up along the Hudson River, in a home that overlooked the Albany port, watching ships move up and down the waterway while dreaming of her escape from a region of Earth that now counted its wealth in history and monuments to the past and little else.

  I should go to sleep, he told himself. Instead, he crossed the sitting room and climbed the short flight of steps to the deck.

  A small human form topped by a mass of dark curls was silhouetted against the railing; Lauren, the female steward, was on watch tonight. She turned toward him.

  “Is there anything you require, Mukhtar Karim?” she asked in badly pronounced Arabic.

  “No, thank you.” He leaned against the railing. They had passed under the Verrazano Bridge and come through the narrows and now lay at anchor in Upper New York Bay. In the moonlight, he was able to glimpse a long low black wall astern of the Beverwyck: the dikes of Staten Island. That morning, he had paid visits to the seawall workers in Asbury Park and Perth Amboy along the Jersey shore, and recalled the wary, suspicious look he had glimpsed in the eyes of many in the crowd as their supervisor introduced him, how they had stared blankly at him as he assured them of the Council’s good intentions and their concern for the people of North America.

  After their arrival in Washington several days ago on a suborbital flight, he and Greta had taken a train to Atlantic City, where they had boarded the Beverwyck after a reception hosted by that city’s officials and a town meeting with some of its citizens. They were given a private car on the train from Washington; their sitting chairs had holes in the red upholstery and the blue and red carpeting was nearly threadbare. The car had rattled as it moved, sometimes so loudly that he and Greta had to shout at each other to be heard. The Atlantic Federation and its sister Nomarchies on the North American continent had the worst trains in the world, perhaps because so many of these people clung to their electric and ethanol-powered automobiles, personal hovercraft, and other forms of private transportation, still holding on to the illusion of being entirely free to go anywhere at will.

  “How long have you served aboard the Beverwyck?” Karim asked the young woman.

  “Served?” At first he thought that she had not understood that word. “But we own the Beverwyck,” Lauren continued, switching to Anglaic, “my brother Zack, my bondmate, and myself. Zack and I bought her five years ago, and not long after that Roberto and I made our pledge, so Zack and I cut him in for an equal share.”

  “I see,” Karim replied in Anglaic, wishing that Greta had told him the three young people were the craft’s owners and not just a crew hired to see to their comfort. But perhaps his wife had not known that. He would have to adjust his manner, treat them with a bit more friendliness and a little less reserve.

  “But it is assuredly less of a drain on our purses for us to look after our passengers ourselves instead of hiring others.” Lauren had switched back to Arabic. “There is not so much to be made with the Beverwyck that we would be able to amply reward any hirelings.”

  “Please.” Karim gestured with one hand. “I don’t mind if we speak in Anglaic, and the practice will be useful for me.”

  “Doesn’t sound to me like you need much practice, Mukhtar Karim, but your Anglaic’s a lot better than my Arabic.” Lauren cleared her throat. “As I was saying, we don’t make all that much, but it isn’t such a bad way to live your life, going up and down the Hudson, taking our time and going slow and not rushing to get up to Troy in a day with a cargo, and we’ve had some interesting passengers. None so interesting as you, of course.”

  “I am flattered,” Karim said.

  “Your wife drove a hard bargain, but a fair one. It also can’t hurt us to have such a prominent passenger. It’ll certainly be good advertising.”

  “I’m grateful to be of some small service to you, then.”

  “Sure there’s nothing I can do for you, sir?” Lauren asked.

  “No, thank you.” He should go back below, force himself to get some sleep.

  Karim left the deck, descended the steps to the sitting room, and closed the door behind him. He had left his linking band on the small tabl
e next to his chair; he sat down and put the thin band around his head once more.

  “Mukhtar Karim,” the soft alto voice of the Beverwyck’s cybermind whispered, “do you wish to call up another mind-tour?” The voice was faint; he was still having some slight trouble interfacing with the artificial intelligence properly through his band. “I have quite an extensive archive of virtual experiences,” the mind went on. “Most of them are far more entertaining and detailed than what you have been accessing.”

  “No doubt they are,” Karim said. His mind-tours of Venus were barely more than sketches and rudimentary designs he had pulled together by himself, and he knew only the rudiments of mind-tour production. His vision lived more fully inside him than in his mind-tours. He wondered if it would ever live in reality.

  “You also need not limit yourself to the subject of the planet Venus,” the AI continued.

  “Ah, but that’s the subject of most concern to me these days,” Karim replied.

  “Perhaps you will tell me why.”

  “Because Earth is of so much concern to me.”

  “That does not seem to cohere with your retreat into your mind-tours,” the AI said. “Nor does it seem consistent with your present assignment of visiting parts of this Nomarchy to assure the people here that the Council of Mukhtars has their best interests at heart.”

  “That assignment,” Karim said, “was given me partly to get me out of the way.”

  The AI had nothing to say to that. Karim thought of how delicately Mukhtar Hassan Tantawi had broached the subject of this tour. Someone had to be sent to the Atlantic Federation, and perhaps to a couple of the other Nomarchies of North America after that, on a diplomatic mission, the object of which was to listen to any grievances and appeals for additional aid and to report any interesting observations. Given that those particular regions of Earth were still among the more suspicious and distrustful of the New Islamic States, they were especially in need of reassurance, and the appearance of a member of the Council would do much to convince them that the Mukhtars who now ruled Earth wanted only to cooperate with them and see that their needs were met.