Echoes of an Alien Sky (40 page)

But they hadn't known. The chronicles from Providence described how they saw the same sickness that had wiped out everyone on Earth and found its way to Luna breaking out among those who had landed. It wasn't a situation that permitted the luxury of time for extensive testing and deliberation in the way the Venusians could afford. They had to assume the worst, that it was still out there, everywhere. So they took what they could and got themselves back up off the surface before everyone was infected.

And what were they to do then? By rights there should have been nothing left open to them.

Yet through a fluke that none of them had expected, there was one possibility. The final entry in the records recovered at Providence told as much as had been known and decided when the craft that had landed there lifted off to rejoin its orbiting mother ship. The conditions that long-range observation and measurements from the ship had detected on Venus did not seem to be as the models handed down from the sciences of former days predicted. It was cooler, with atmospheric characteristics and chemistry that appeared compatible with a livable environment, and it had acquired a respectable axial spin. There was no mention of the presence of Froile—which answered the question of how much its capture had contributed: effectively none. It was the result of electrical effects, as Yorim and most of the Venusian astronomers had maintained.

What it must have taken for that last remaining handful to make the effort after all they had been through, most Venusians were thankful they would probably never know. But that side of Terrans that inspired awe had still been there. Whatever it had taken, they had risen to it, and had made that effort. And the result was Venusians reading their story today, still speaking a language that was closer to the words it had been written in than theirs was to that of their distant ancestors who had migrated to Eden.

As well as minimal stocks from Providence, they took with them livestock and plants from Earth that they hoped they would be able to introduce. This explained the presence on Venus of organisms with the quadribasic form of DNA, and the paradox of why they seemed to be more advanced as a group than the hexabasic types, which were more widespread and should have afforded a greater potential for flexibility and complexity. In a way that Lorili's hypothesis had anticipated, the hexabasics were native, and had evolved to a degree that was appropriate to the present conditions on Venus; the quadribasics—which included Venusians—were imported Terran varieties and their descendants, from an older, more mature world.

What happened after then had to be filled in by conjecture, but it seemed that their travails had still not yet ended. Even the chance to rebuild from such slender beginnings amid the harshness of Venus's swamps and lava fields was denied. Before the exhausted and bewildered arrivals could even consolidate in their new, hostile environment, Froile appeared in the sky above them, bringing convulsions and climatic upheaval to complete the ruin of the last shreds of their civilization that they had managed to save. They reverted to a primitiveness from which it had taken centuries to recover, losing all traces and memory of their origins in the process. Only versions of those events enshrined in mythical form had survived to be passed down from what present-day Venusians had thought were the earliest days of their race. The parallel to the far more devastating catastrophes reconstructed as having taken place in the Terrans' own early history was obvious and sombering. What set the two epochs of happenings apart, other than the difference in severity, was that the forefathers of the Venusians—being products of an advanced scientific culture themselves, whatever else they might have lost—hadn't taken recourse in the vengeance and judgment of supernatural gods to explain them.

The first inclination among the Venusian researchers was to accept the capture of Froile at just such a moment as one of those unfortunate coincidences that nature seems to come up with from time to time to test the mettle of its creations. However, further calculations on long-range spacecraft electromagnetics by Kyal and Yorim, in conjunction with information gained from the Providence records about the craft that had made the voyage from Eden, suggested that there might have been rather more to it than just coincidence. Kyal was always suspicious of coincidences anyway.

An incoming vessel from another star system could acquire an enormous electrical potential difference with respect to anything local in the Solar System. The builders of Providence had provided a primary discharge attractor at Camp 27 and downrange backup at Yuma, but such provisions could only be based on guesses of what would be required, not on whatever the returning ship had actually experienced. And even if the guesses had been close, after all that time there could have been no guarantee that the constructions built in response to them still existed.

A copy of the narrative from the craft that had made the landing at Providence talked about "dumping" the
residual
charge when they were on their final approach. Searching back further turned up the log of the mother ship that had made the voyage back from Eden. Its course into the Solar System had been on the far side of the Sun from where Earth was at the time, crossing the interior of Earth's orbit. On the way, it had tracked and course-matched to an orbiting minor body that it had coupled to electrically and shed a large part of the extraneous charge accumulated in the interstellar medium. The interaction would also involve transferring much of the ship's incoming momentum, which would have perturbed the receiving body's path. Sensitive nonlinear dynamics were involved, meaning that its new direction could have been just about anything, and for the likely ranges of velocity and mass that such an body would possess, the imparted velocity change came out in the order of several hundred to maybe a couple of thousand miles per hour—modest enough, and with the possibility of added electrical effects arising from its acquired charge, to make a capture scenario by Venus plausible. The ship's log described the object as "elongated and knobby."

Their error over the virus might have been the supreme irony, but this was the final one. Having abandoned Earth to make that one last effort, and left behind them most of what had been provided to help toward making a fresh start,
they themselves
had already set in motion the destruction of whatever fragile toe-hold on Venus that they would be able to establish.

I had been there all along, but wrapped in terms that had caused generations of Venusians to read it as meaning anything except exactly what it said. "The Legend of the Wanderers," Lorili recalled, when Kyal told her about the latest findings. "How did it go, again? The ancestors of long ago, who didn't like the ways of the world, went to the end of it. It got a bit garbled there, didn't it? The 'end' that it talked about was Terminus. And then they left to go and live on the Sun. Well, not
on
the
Sun, but
at
another
sun, I suppose. And wasn't there something about rising from the dead?"

"Some versions say that," Kyal agreed. "But the more usual line is that they came eventually to the Place Of Death but escaped from it. We know now where that was: Providence." He went on, "When they returned, The Wanderers had annoyed the local inhabitants by frightening their dog away. So when they caught it again, they made it their watchdog in the sky, to make sure the Wanderers stayed home from then on."

"And Froile was born out of hurricanes and floods, when the sky fell, and the seas moved over the land," Lorili completed.

It all fitted.

Kyal and Lorili stood by the window wall of Sherven's office. Beyond the glass, exterior parts of
Explorer 6
stood out as geometric shapes of reflected Earthlight against the slowly moving starfield. Sherven and Casello were in front of the curved desk with its side panel, sharing the view. Yorim and Mirine were there too, standing on the far side of the room, where screens flickered and glowed in the battery of displays alongside the arch leading through to the conference area.

Below the superstructure, the
Melthor Jorg
was docked once more. The time had come to go home. Locating Providence had proved to be a short-lived task, and its further exploration was now in other hands. Kyal had a program of professional commitments to attend to following the later developments, and Lorili needed to tidy up family matters. They would return after being married on Venus. Their home, they had decided, would be in on the western coast of North America, somewhere near the rapidly growing town that the Regional Base was transforming itself into, and already referred to unofficially by its Terran place name: Pasadena. And if Lorili was going back, it was only natural that her assistant since the early days should be going too. At least, that was what Mirine said. Yorim and Mirine hadn't announced any definite plans, but the general feeling among the others was that Kyal and Yorim were as inseparable as the two women, and it wouldn't be very long before the four found themselves in close proximity again.

In the meantime, Casselo would be returning to Rhombus after his sojourn on
Explorer 6
. Sherven was making no secret that he was wrapping up official duties and would soon be retiring to southern Europe. This didn't mean an end to his involvement with scientific matters concerning the Terrans, but on the contrary, a shedding of administrative responsibilities in order to be able to devote more of his time to them. Although they would all doubtless continue to communicate and meet from time to time over the years ahead, the moment was poignant in marking the end of an extraordinarily fruitful period of discovery from which they had all drawn, and to which they had contributed in that peculiar, mutually enhancing rapport that can be generated by unusually creative people working closely together. It was the kind of experience that graced the lives of a few privileged people perhaps once, and for most, never at all.

The Venus that they would be going back to had undergone its own experience of transformation and realization too. The hardline following of the Progressive movement had wilted; at the same time, the traditional merit-focused establishment was broadening its stance and committing to re-examining some of its ways with a view to providing more in the way of helping hands toward the needy, or simply unlucky. The reactions from both sides were an expression of the universal horror that had come with the realization of what the extinction of the Terrans implied.

Compared to Venus, the Terrans had been given a garden. But the knowledge that they had amassed through centuries of effort and dedication in developing their sciences and their industries, that could have carried them outward to plant other gardens among the stars in the ways some of them had dreamed, they had turned instead to their main preoccupation of destruction and killing. Aggression and a history of "settling" differences by organized violence—it never settled anything—had been the culprit. Venusians heard the same readiness to resort to force in the demands of the Progressive extremists. And the accessories had been the Terran hierarchies of power by which the few commanded the obedience and labors of the many. Venusians saw beginnings of the same thing in the institutionalized favoritism and privilege that were appearing in their own governing system. On both counts, they were resolved not to emulate the ways that had brought about the downfall of the Terrans.

"It must say a lot for the people up in the mother ship that they not only waited, but sent down help," Lorili said. They were recapitulating on some of the outcomes from it all—a way of prolonging the moment before the two departing couples left to join the waiting ship.

Sherven rubbed his chin. "Oh, I don't know that they could have done differently. Could you? After they'd been together all that time through the long voyage back?"

"And from what I read of it, that elder, Zaam, doesn't seem like the kind they would lightly have abandoned," Casselo agreed. "He was the one who got them there."

Sherven moved to the window and stood looking out with his hands clasped behind his back. Below, the bulk of the
Melthor Jorg
hung against the backdrop of void,

lit up by the lights of supply craft and service platforms preparing the ship for its departure.

"So it turns out after all that we are indeed the Terrans' direct descendants," he said. "The reason we're not comfortable on Venus is that it isn't ready for our kind yet." Kyal caught Lorili's eye and gave her an approving nod. She smiled but didn't say anything. Sherven went on, "Where Terrans came from in turn is an open question. I still think it's pretty clear that by its very nature and laws, the universe is preprogrammed to produce air-breathing, oxygen-fueled, carbon-based life on aqueous planets, very much like ourselves, wherever the conditions are right. How it came to be that way, and why, only Vizek knows. I don't believe this Terran fable of unguided matter being able to organize itself in such ways mindlessly, for no reason. In denying the universe its soul, the Terrans denied their own. That was what made them what they were, and what ultimately brought them to the kind of end that befell them."

Sherven turned from the window to face the others again, spreading his arms sideways along the ledge behind him. "So let's, for a moment, consider some of the deeper implications that pertain to us directly. Many Venusians have admired what they perceived as the Terran spirit of self-assertiveness and their refusal to submit to injustices. Those are noble thoughts, and let's not belittle them. But I would urge an element of caution in taking their praises of themselves too literally, because we know that they habitually distorted reality to a degree we would find untenable when it suited their purpose." He ran his gaze briefly over the listening faces. "But having said that, I have to agree that there's a part of the heritage we owe to them that makes me proud."

Nobody interrupted. Their faces were solemn. Kyal realized that Sherven was speaking for all of them. He had never expressed positive sentiments regarding the Terrans before.