Maelstrom (4 page)
Interesting exchange, that. Jack Noble had certainly confirmed Blake’s suspicion that the Tappers were not what they seemed. Through discrete inquiries of his parents and their friends, Blake had already compiled a list of the dozen men and women currently on the Tappers’ rolls and looked into their backgrounds. Their circumstances and occupations were quite varied–an educator, a nanoware tycoon, a well-known symphony orchestra conductor, a cognitive psychologist, a medical doctor, a neuroscientist, a freebooter like Noble–but they had more in common than just their interest in encouraging youth, and this too seemed an odd coincidence: all the Tappers had had ancestors who had left England in the 17th century, after having been arrested as “Ranters.”
Das Kapital
, Blake came across tantalizing information about the Ranters.
Under the rule of Cromwell, according to one distraught observer, “heresies come thronging upon us in swarms, as the Caterpillers of Aegypt.” Especially noxious were the Ranters, concentrated in London, infamous for their rioting, carousing, and shouting of obscenities–as well as of slogans that seemed innocent but had some special meaning to initiates, such as “all is well.” Ranters disdained traditional forms of religion and professed loudly and ecstatically that God was in every creature and that every creature was God. Like their contemporaries the Diggers, the Ranters believed that all people had an equal claim to land and property, and that there ought to be a “community of goods.” Not only goods and real estate were shared. “We are pure, say they, and so all things are pure to us, adultery, fornication, etc. . . .”
The authorities cracked down. Some Ranters died in prison. Some Ranters repented; many converted and became gentle Quakers. Some, driven into hiding, adopted secret languages and clandestinely continued to propagandize and recruit. Some, evidently, had made their way to the New World.
Theirs was the legacy of a savagely suppressed heresy which had persisted in Europe since the first millennium, known at its height as the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, whose adepts called themselves
prophetae.
The great themes of this hopeful heresy were love, freedom, the power of humanity; explicit expressions of their dreams could be found in the prophetic books of the Bible, written eight centuries before Christ, and repeated in the Book of Daniel, in the Book of Revelation, and in many other more obscure texts. These apocalyptic visions foretold the coming of a superhuman savior who would elevate human beings to the power and freedom of God and establish Paradise on Earth.
But the Free Spirit were impatient with visions; they wanted Paradise now. In northern Europe they repeatedly rose in armed revolt against their feudal masters and the authorities of the church. The movement was crushed in 1580 but not eradicated. Later scholars could trace its connections–by influence, if not as a living cult–to Nietzsche, to Lenin, to Hitler.
From what he knew of the Tappers, Blake suspected that the Free Spirit was still alive, not only as an idea but as an organization, perhaps many organizations. The Tappers were in touch with others like themselves on other continents of Earth, on other planets, on the space stations and moons and asteroids.
SPARTA had had something to do with that purpose. The woman who called herself Ellen Troy had had something to do with that purpose. But Blake’s attempts to learn more through ordinary methods of research had encountered a blank wall.
In Paris there was a philanthropic society known as the Athanasians, whose business was to feed the hungry, or at least a select few of them. The same Paris address housed a small publishing company that specialized in archaeology books, everything from scholarly works to coffee-table tomes full of color holos of ruins, a list running heavily to the glories of ancient Egypt. One of the Tappers was on the board of the company, known as Editions Lequeu.
Blake sniffed a further connection: the name Athanasius meant “immortal” in Greek, but it had also been the first name of a famous early scholar of hieroglyphs, the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher. When business for Sotheby’s took Blake to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he used the excellent cover of the occasion for a bit of on-the-spot private investigation. . . .
Blake strolled the broad sidewalks of the Boul Mich. The broad green leaves of the chestnuts spread out like five-fingered hands over his head; bright sunlight filtered into the deep shadows beneath the trees. The light had a greenish cast. As he walked, he pondered his options.
Urban universities are great attractors of the homeless, and the university of Paris had never been an exception. A woman approached him, dressed in genteel tatters, perhaps thirty years old, wrinkled as an apple doll but pretty not long ago. “Do you speak English?” she asked in English, and then, still in English, “Do you speak Dutch?” Blake shoved some colored paper bills into her hand and she thrust it crumpled into the waist of her skirt. “
Merci, monsieur, merci beaucoup
,” and in English again, “but guard your wallet, sir, the Africans will pick your pockets. The streets are swarming with Africans, so black they are, so big, you must guard yourself. . . .”
He strolled past a sidewalk cafe where another woman, her baby face smudged and her hair wildly awry, was entertaining the patrons with a Shirley Temple imitation, tap-dancing
The Good Ship Lollipop
with demonic energy. They tossed money at her, but she wouldn’t go away until she finished her wretched performance.
A row of men in their twenties, bearded, their brown faces splotched with broken red blisters, sat on the sidewalk and rested against the fence of the Luxembourg gardens. They didn’t offer him anything or ask him for anything.
Blake reached Montparnasse. On the horizon, above the centuries-old roofs of the city, rose a ring of highrises which enclosed central Paris like a palisade. The wall of cement and glass cut off what breeze there was, trapping fetid summer air in the basin of the Seine. Around him the eternal traffic of Paris swirled, quieter and less smoky now that all the scooters and cars were electric, but as breakneck and aggressive as ever; there was a constant hiss of tires, accompanied by the jackass whinny and neigh of horns as drivers tried to shove each other out of the way and cut each other off by sound and fury alone. Paris, City of Light.
Blake turned back along the same route. This time the African didn’t try to sell him an ornithopter. Shirley Temple was opening a new show, farther down the boulevard. The apple-doll woman came at him again, her memory a blank. “Do you speak English? Do you speak Dutch?”
Blake knew what he had to do next–he had to find a way to join the Free Spirit. Although the Tappers knew Blake Redfield all too well, other arms of the international cult fished in other waters; the homeless youth of Europe were a deep reservoir of malleable souls. After three days in Paris he had no doubt that Editions Lequeu and the Athanasian Society were the same organization. The Athanasians might find a derelict with a fascination for things Egyptian an especially attractive catch.
Almost two years had past since Blake saw Ellen Troy in the Grand Central Conservatory. At a Sotheby’s auction, Blake had agreed to represent a Port Hesperus buyer in what turned out to be a successful bid to acquire a valuable first edition of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, by T. E. Lawrence. Then, while transporting the book to Port Hesperus, the freighter
Star Queen
had had a fatal mishap.*
The
Star Queen
incident is related in
Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime, Volume 1: Breaking Strain
.
When Blake learned who had been assigned to investigate the incident, he immediately booked passage on a liner to Venus–ostensibly to see to the safety of his client’s property, but actually to confront the Space Board inspector who was handling the
Star Queen
case, Ellen Troy herself. This time Blake made it impossible for her avoid him.
Thus it was on Port Hesperus, in that transformer room in the central spindle of the garden sphere, that Blake for the first time was able to share with his old schoolmate Linda the startling knowledge he’d gained. “The more I study this subject, the more connections I find, and the farther back they reach,” Blake told her. “In the 13th century they were known as adepts of the Free Spirit, the
prophetae
–but whatever name they’ve used, they’ve never been eradicated. Their goal has always been godhood. Perfection in this life. Superman.”
But when Sparta asked him why they’d tried to kill her, Blake could only surmise that she had learned more than she was supposed to. “I think you learned that SPARTA was more than your father and mother claimed. . . .”
III
The shell that contained her split open. She stumbled forward on six shaky legs, into a wall of stone.
Her hind legs supported her while she stretched her barbed forelegs to grasp the top of the ledge. The soft stone crumbled in her pincer grip. Momentarily scrabbling for purchase, she hefted herself upward, her wobbly joints creaking. She paused to spread her wings, to peer around and taste the air with waving antennas. It carried a tang of rotten eggs. Bracing.
The atmosphere was like thick glass, clear, suffused with red light. She swung her armored head from side to side, but she couldn’t see far; the horizon vanished in the scattered light. Her antennas dipped, and she picked up sensations of the terrain in front of her. Somewhere ahead, these other senses informed her, great cliffs rose into the glowing sky.
Her titanium claws rested lightly on the crusted ground, its baked surface cool to her touch. Liquid lithium pulsed through her vitals and flowed through the veins of her delicate molybdenum-doped stainless-steel wings, carrying away her body heat as gently as mild perspiration in an April breeze. She had stepped dewily from her chrysalis into the morning of a long Venusian day.
“We have you,” said the voice of Azure Dragon’s shuttle controller. “Your shuttle came down ninety meters west of the targeted landing site. Sorry about that. Bear four degrees right of your present heading and continue for approximately three point five kilometers until you reach the base of the cliffs.”
It had been almost two hours since the last signal from the grounded expedition. Twenty-four hours ago they had landed at Dragon Base and made their way to their goal in a rover like Sparta’s. Soon they had made the first of what promised to be many triumphant discoveries. Now triumph was forgotten. The challenge was to bring them out alive.
Sparta picked her way carefully along a shallow channel. Long ago this plain had glistened with a film of water; over it, almost imperceptible tides had gently advanced and receded. Now it was a sheet of orange sandstone, its surface furry with corrosion. She thought it a curious sensation to put her feet through the rotted rind of the rock, kicking up lazy clouds of dust as she moved ahead.
Nothing apparent came between Sparta’s natural senses and the world through which she moved. The eyes of the seven-meter-long rover were her eyes–or might as well have been–peering directly into the dense Venusian atmosphere through diamond lenses that took in a 360-degree field of view. Its six jointed legs and claws were hers–even the two that grew out of her midsection–and its stainless steel skin and titanium skeleton were hers. The nuclear reactor–quite realistically palpable in Sparta’s abdomen–generated the warmth of a good turkey dinner.
The real woman, small and thin-boned, her muscles those of a dancer, sat forward in the vehicle inside a double sphere of titanium aluminide, a sort of diving bell with one overhead hatch and no windows. But the computer-generated Artificial Reality in which she was immersed persuaded her that she was a naked creature, to this planet born. To move, she willed herself to move. Inside her opaque helmet, laser beams tracked her eye movements. Microscopic strain gauges embedded in the skintight control suit monitored and magnified her body’s motions. Surround-sound, retinal projection, and the suit’s orthotactic fabric–200 pressure transducers, a hundred heat-exchange elements, a thousand chemical synapses per square centimeter– fed back a vivid sense of the world outside.
Inevitably, something was lost in the translation. For the fragile human female inside the bell, the outside temperature–almost 750 degrees Kelvin, sufficient to soften type metal–was scaled down to that of a balmy morning. The air outside was almost pure carbon dioxide, laced with a few rare gases, but inside the bell she breathed a familiar oxygen-nitrogen mix. The outside pressure–ninety Earth atmospheres, enough to crush a submarine–was rendered neutral. Even the light-bending distortion of the thick atmosphere had been corrected, so that her human visual cortex registered a familiar flat world instead of a bowl-shaped one. But its horizon was only a few hundred meters away; if it had not been for her vehicle’s radar and sonar, Sparta would have been traveling blind.
