Venus of Shadows (15 page)

"When did you get back?" the dark-haired man asked.

"Just a little while ago," Risa replied.

"Your last shift, wasn't it?" one of the men sitting by the table said. "Lucky you."

"I thought I'd stop by and see Pavel on my way home. Is he around?"

The man standing next to her frowned. "He's resting in his room. Been weaker lately, but then, he's an old man." He lowered his voice. "I tried to talk him into going over to the infirmary, but he wouldn't hear of it, kept saying it'd be a waste of medical resources. I guess he's right, but —" He shrugged. "Go on — he won't mind a visit from you."

She turned right, entered a small hallway, and pressed her hand against the first door to her left. It slid open; she entered the tiny room and saw the empty bed. A white-haired man sat on a cushion in one corner with a reading screen on his folded legs.

"Dawud said you were resting," Risa said. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."

Pavel's heavy white brows rose slightly as he peered up at her. "Not at all. You know I always enjoy seeing you."

She studied the old man for a moment. His dark eyes no longer seemed as alert, and he had lost weight. Rejuvenation could do little for him now; she knew the signs. But Pavel Gvishiani had been an old man when he first came to Oberg. When his disgrace had faded in people's minds, merciful Administrators had decided to let him spend his last years on the world he had helped to build, and which he had once hoped to rule.

"Sit down, child." She sat on the bed. "I trust you stopped by the monument."

"Chen expects it of me." Memorials to the dead were not a topic she would have chosen for a talk with Pavel. "He worries about that monument too much — always thinking about whether it's properly tended and that people remember what it was for."

"That's understandable. Even my thoughts have turned to it lately. It's one of my regrets — that your mother died as she did."

Risa shook her head. "Pavel, don't be sentimental with me. You're only sorry that you miscalculated."

"How harsh you are sometimes."

"I'm realistic." They rarely discussed her mother. Iris's death, and that of Amir Azad, might have been avoided if Pavel had not played for time in the hope of keeping his position. That was how Chen viewed the matter.

Risa saw the past differently. Pavel had seen what the Project required and had acted. He had seen himself as a Cytherian rather than as a minion of the Mukhtars and had acted in the interests of his world.

"My mother was somewhat brave," she went on. "But the people who seized that dome might also have been brave in their own way. They knew Earth would win if they didn't take action — the Islands would have had to surrender completely if the siege had gone on long enough. The plotters who died with my mother also gave their lives for the Project."

"How odd to hear such words from you, Risa."

"I may not approve of their methods, but I understand their motives."

"They foolishly threatened some Habber lives. They'd hardly have kept helping us if they no longer felt safe among us."

Habbers, she thought. Tolerable because they were useful, but they were not people to depend on. Habbers retreated from difficulties, or were the descendants of those who had. The Islanders who saw them as new friends were deceiving themselves.

"But what lies ahead for you, now that you're back?" Pavel tilted his head. "A run for the Council, perhaps? Enough people rely on your advice — you ought to put yourself in a position where it'll carry more weight."

She shrugged. People sought her advice, in the hope of avoiding public hearings over their disputes or the need to call in a Counselor from the Islands to settle those that could not be resolved. She had gained a reputation for fairness, but a good amount of the advice she gave was Pavel's. His Administrator's experience was valuable.

"And you might make plans with your young man," Pavel continued. "You're at an age when many have a bondmate and children."

She smiled; Pavel had never had either. "If I take a bondmate, it won't be Evar. I'm not going to spend the next ten or twenty years listening to his tedious talk about Ishtar."

"Ah, yes. You told me that he had grown quite devout. It's dismaying to see people involved in such foolishness, but we can be grateful their numbers are still small. One might almost think that Earth was surreptitiously encouraging that cult."

Risa folded her arms. "Earth? Members of Ishtar dislike Earth — they dream of being free of the Mukhtars."

"They dislike Habbers more, and without them, we'd be even more dependent on Earth's help. Well, I won't live long enough to see what role, if any, they'll play here."

Again, she worried about what might happen when Pavel was gone, when all the older Cytherians were gone. They had lived to see surface settlements and had expected little more.

Many of the younger settlers were not quite so patient. They resented the Project Council, distrusted Habbers, and dreamed of a world where the distinctions they wanted to escape would be erased. At times, the desires of the younger settlers seemed contradictory; each wanted to rise as high as possible while hoping for a world where no one would be higher than anyone else.

"Sometimes I'm sorry that I never had children," Pavel murmured, "I wouldn't have minded having a daughter like you — someone who understood me, who'd listen and be frank with me."

"You have that now," she replied. "Plenty of people seek you out." Pavel was being more maudlin than usual, wistful about the past and sentimental about the present. "Anyway, if I'd actually been your daughter, I might not have understood you as well, and you probably wouldn't have been honest with me."

He set down his screen, tried to rise, then settled back on his cushion. "Could you help me to the bed?" he asked. She stood and helped him up; he leaned against her and hobbled toward the bed. He stretched out; she propped a small pillow under his head, then handed him his screen. "I'll fetch you some food, Pavel."

"I won't be awake long enough to eat it."

She embraced him, pressing her cheek against his. "You flatter me, Risa," he said weakly. "I was past this when you were still a child."

"Rest and get stronger, and maybe you'll surprise yourself."

*  *  *

When Risa left Pavel's house, the overhead disk of light was fading. The growing darkness gave an illusion of space; she could almost forget that the dome was there. She walked past the houses, nodding at the people she knew as they hurried home. Beyond Pavel's dwelling, the evening call to prayer was sounding from the mosque's small minaret.

She still had a walk ahead of her; the main dome was five kilometers in diameter. Oberg's able-bodied citizens moved through their settlement on foot whenever possible; the walking exercised their bodies and kept the domes free of too many roadways and vehicles. She moved away from the houses and followed a small creek to the west.

At the western end of this dome, just beyond the Buddhist temple, she met the flat main road again; a cart was rolling toward the tunnel that led to Oberg's west dome. She followed the cart down the gently sloping ramp that slipped under the wall.

Overhead panels lighted the underground passageway; two empty carts stood against the walls. Part of one wall had been painted in an abstract pattern, while other sections were marred by lettering in Anglaic, Arabic, and a few other languages. Someone had added an inscription she hadn't seen before, in black Anglaic letters: help! i'm a prisoner of freedom! She smiled and walked on.

She came to another sloping ramp and went up into the west dome; ahead of her, a curved path led away from the main road toward a group of dwellings and small greenhouses. Trees hid some of the houses from view, and much of the flat land surrounding them was covered by shrubs and high grass.

Engineers, aided by Habbers, had begun to build this dome, and another one like it to the southeast, soon after Risa and her father had come to Venus's surface. They had lived in a dormitory in the main dome for four years while this one was completed; she remembered peering over the main dome's wall as airships lowered the second dome over the cleared and leveled land.

Their home now was a one-story building with two small rectangular wings; it sat among slender trees about thirty meters from the entrance to the tunnel. Chen had built most of the house himself, from materials given to him. She and her father had been among the earliest settlers, those who had come to Oberg sixteen years ago when only its main dome was ready, Tsou Yen was uninhabited, and two other settlements, Galileo and al-Khwarizmi, were not yet habitable. Now, ten domed settlements sat on plateaus among the Maxwell Mountains, and thousands of settlers had followed Risa and Chen to the surface.

She turned onto a tree-lined stone path, glanced at her household's small greenhouse, and pressed her palm against the front door's lock.

The door opened. Her father was sitting alone in the common room. Bettina, who was a physician, was probably off tending to a patient elsewhere, while her son, Paul, would be with the young woman he loved.

Chen sat on the floor at the comer table where he kept his carving tools and supplies; a lump of clay, partly molded into a face, was in front of him. He looked up as she approached; his smile was quick. "Welcome home, Risa."

She leaned over and kissed him on his brow. "I stopped by the memorial. Someone left a wreath, and the monument's been polished. A few people asked me to read the inscription to them." Maybe he would assume that she had lingered there, although he could probably guess that she had visited Pavel. "Starting something else? Have you finished the carving for Paul and Grazie?"

Chen shook his head. "It'll get done."

"You don't have much time. They'll be making their pledge in a few days." Chen had once hoped that she and Paul might someday make a pledge, but Paul had always seemed more like a brother. He was two years older than Risa and had lived with his father before joining Bettina in Oberg three years after her arrival. Risa had often thought that Bettina and Chen wanted their children to be bondmates because they had never made a pledge themselves.

Iris still held him, she thought. He had a life with Bettina, but Iris would be his only bondmate. Perhaps his affection for Bettina rested largely on the fact that the physician was a Plainswoman as Iris had been.

Chen's once-dark hair was gray; tiny lines marked the pale brown skin around his eyes. His small, stocky body was still sturdy. He had always been strong and would have at least three decades of life still ahead of him, even here. Bettina scanned him regularly and found no cause for concern, but Chen was eighty, older than most of the settlers.

Risa gestured at the clay. "Who's the subject?"

"I thought I might try to capture your brother."

She frowned. "I can't imagine why." The mention of Benzi dismayed her; Chen rarely spoke of the son he had lost.

He gazed at her steadily. "I had a message from Benzi yesterday," he said. "He was on Anwara, preparing to return to his Hab. The people there didn't trouble him over the message, in spite of who he is, and I said I was willing to accept it." He waved a hand at the large wall screen behind him. "He looks much the same, your brother, even after all these years."

She hardly knew what to say. "But why did he want to talk to you?"

"He wanted to see how we were. He said he wanted me to know he hadn't forgotten me."

"After all this time? Does he really think we'd care? Why didn't he ask a Habber here to pass along a message to you earlier if he was so concerned?"

"You mustn't be too hard on him, Risa. He might have thought his new life would be easier if he left this one completely behind."

"And exactly what was he doing on Anwara?" she asked.

"He was one of the pilots bringing new settlers from Earth."

"Really!" Her jaw tightened. Benzi was a part of Chen's life best forgotten, a son who had wounded both his parents and the Project. Iris was the mother she could not emulate, and Benzi was the brother for whose actions she was supposed to atone. "Is he feeling remorseful now? It's a little late for that, isn't it?"

"He still feels a bond with us."

"I don't feel one with him! You shouldn't have spoken to him at all. He doesn't deserve your love — he didn't care about you when he abandoned the Project."

"He's my son, and Iris's."

"He cut his ties to you long ago."

"I can't forget that he's still our son."

She said, "I'd never forgive a child who treated me the way he treated you."

He lifted his chin. "You won't feel that way when you have a child of your own."

Benzi had cast Chen aside. Risa had tried to fill the void in her father's heart. She had not fulfilled some of his hopes for her, but she had done her best to be a good daughter. The love Chen still held for his son seemed a betrayal of his love for her.

"Benzi told me something else," Chen continued. "When he was on Earth, he talked a little with a man there — this man was a passenger on his ship. He was a Linker once, but his Link was removed. Benzi gave me the man's name — I think he felt a bit sorry for him."

"How kind," Risa said acidly. "And just why did he feel compelled to tell you about this unfortunate man?"

"He seemed concerned about what might happen to him here, how he would adjust. The man was a historian, and once taught in a university. He isn't the kind of settler we usually get. As it turns out, Benzi may have done us a favor."

"How so?"

"After I spoke to Benzi," Chen said, "I asked the screen to tell me what it could of the man's public record. His name is Malik Haddad, and from what I could tell, he lost his Link only because of things he'd said or written that the Mukhtars didn't like. I went to see Theron last night and told him what I'd found out, since he'd said our school here could use a new teacher. Theron's already put in a request for the man by name, and it's been granted."

"So the children will have another teacher. Theron might have found someone who knows something more practical."