Space (24 page)

The world was red.

The sky was tall above her, a vast diffuse dome of dull, oppressive red. The air was thick -- it resisted her motions, like a fluid, as if she were immersed in some sea -- but it was clear, and still. The rocks were crimson plates. There seemed to be some kind of frost on them; here and there they sparkled, dully. Now, how could that be?

She walked forward. She tried to describe the ground, to be a geologist.

"The plain has many fine features: honeycombs, small ridges, fissures. It is littered with flat plates of rock, one or two meters wide. It is like a flat, rocky desert on Earth." She knelt to inspect a rock more closely; exoskeletal multipliers prodded her limbs, helping her position her heavy suit. "I can see strata in this rock. It looks like a terrestrial volcanic rock, perhaps a gabbro, but it seems to have been formed by multiple lava flows, over time. The rock is speckled by dark spots. They seem to be erosionpits. They are filled with soil. There is something like frost glittering, a very fine shimmer, clusters of crystals." She had a lab unit. She pressed it against the surface of a rock, being sure she caught a little of that strange layer of frost.

Cautiously, with a hand encased in an articulated tungsten glove like a claw, she reached out to touch the rock. That frosty layer scraped away; it was clearly very thin. Of course it couldn't be water-ice frost. What, then?

At her gentle prod, a section of the rock the size of her hand broke away along a plane and crumbled to dust and fragments that sank slowly to the ground.

She straightened up. Experimentally she raised one foot and stepped up onto a rock. It crumbled like a meringue, breaking along cracks that ran deep into the rock's fabric.

This was chemical weathering. There was no water here to wash away the rocks, no rain to drench them, no frost to crack them, no strong winds to batter them with sand. But the dense, corrosive atmosphere worked its way into the fine structure of the rocks, eating them away from the inside. All over Venus, she thought, the rocks must simply be rotting in place, waiting for a nudge to crumble and fall.

She looked around.

She was standing on a plateau, here in the Maxwell Montes. To her south, no more than a kilometer away, a steep cliff led down to the deeper plains. To the north -- beyond the squat lander on its sturdy legs -- she could see the great shadowy bulks of the mountains, cones of a deeper crimson painted against the red sky.

She had landed some five kilometers above the mean level -- there was no sea level on Venus, with no seas. Here, in the balmy heights of Ishtar Terra, it was some forty degrees cooler than on the great volcanic plains -- though, at more than four hundred degrees centigrade, that was little help to her equipment -- and the air pressure was only a third of its peak value, on the lowest plains. But this was nearly as deep into Venus's air ocean as she could go.

Still, her suit was a monstrous shell of tungsten, more like a deep-sea diver's suit than a space suit. On her back and chest she wore packs laden with consumables and heat exchangers, sufficient to keep her alive for a few hours. But, like her ship, her key piece of refrigeration technology was a set of lasers that periodically dumped her excess heat into the Venusian rock. The suit was ingenious, but hardly comfortable; Venus's gravity was 90 percent of Earth's, and the suit was heavy and confining.

She tilted back and looked up into the sky.

She couldn't see the Sun; the dim, crimson light was uniform, thoroughly scattered, apparently without a source. But the sky was not featureless. She could see through the lower air and the haze to those great cloud decks, all of fifty kilometers above. There were holes in the clouds, patches of brighter sky, making it a great uneven sheet of light. And the patches were moving. The sky was full of giant shifting shapes of light and darkness, slowly forming and dissolving, like fragments of a nightmare. The flow was stately, silent, a sign of huge stratospheric violence far removed from the still, windless pool of air in which she stood.

Astonishing, beautiful. And nobody in all human history had seen this before her.

"I've analyzed your frost," Nemoto said evenly. "It's tellurium. Almost pure metal. On Venus, tellurium would vaporize at lower altitudes. So it has snowed out here, just as water snows out at the peaks of our own mountains."

A snow of metal. How remarkable, Carole thought.

"Now," Nemoto said slyly, "tellurium is rare. It makes up only one-billionth of one percent of our surface rocks, and we've no reason to believe the rocks of Venus differ so significantly. But tellurium, for a technological society, is useful stuff. We use it to improve stainless steel, and in electrolysis, and in electronics, and as a catalyst in refining petroleum. How did so much tellurium, such an exotic high-tech material, get deposited on Venus?"

Not by the natives, Carole thought, those wretched long-extinct bacteria.
Visitors.
Those who came here before us, before the Gaijin, long before. Perhaps they were the acid-breathers who built the moonlets. Perhaps they crashed here, and the tellurium was a relic of their ship: all that remains of them after eight hundred million years -- a thin metallic frost on the mountains of Venus.

There was a sudden flash, far above. Many minutes later, she heard what sounded like thunder. Giant electrical storms raged in those high clouds. But there was no rain, of course.

She watched the clouds, entranced.

She walked steadily forward, heading southwest, away from the lander. Soon she was approaching the lip of the plateau. She could see no land beyond; evidently the drop-off was steep.

"Let me tell you what I believe," Nemoto whispered. "When Venus formed, it was indeed a twin of Earth. I believe Venus rotated quickly, much as Earth does, as Mars does, taking no more than a few Earth days to spin on its axis; why should Venus have been different? I believe Venus was formed with a moon, like Earth's. And I believe it had oceans, of liquid water. There is no reason why Venus should not have formed with as much water as Earth. There were oceans, and tides..."

With surprising suddenness, Carole came to the edge.

A cliff face fell away before her, marked here and there by the lobed flow of landslides. This great ridge ran for kilometers to either side, all the way to the horizon and beyond. And the slope continued down -- on and on, down and down, as if she were looking over the edge of a continental shelf into some deeper ocean -- until it merged with a plateau, far below, and then the planet-circling volcanic plain beyond that.

This was the edge of the Maxwell mountains region. This cliff descended six kilometers in just eight kilometers' distance, an average slope of thirty-five degrees. There was nothing like it on Earth, anywhere.

She had to descend to the level of the Lakshmi Planum, six kilometers below, to study Nemoto's puzzle. They hadn't anticipated any surface journey of such length and difficulty; she hadn't brought a surface vehicle, and the lander had neither the fuel nor the capability to fly her deeper into the ocean of air. And so she had to walk.

Nemoto had said she owed it to the human race to accept the risk, to complete her mission. Carole just thought she owed it to her mother, who would surely not have hesitated.

"Of course Venus is closer to the Sun; even wet, Venus was not an identical twin of Earth. The air was dominated by carbon dioxide. The oceans were hot -- perhaps as hot as two hundred degrees -- and the atmosphere humid, laden with clouds. But, thanks to the water, plate tectonics operated, and much of the carbon dioxide was kept locked up in the carbonate rocks, which were periodically subducted into the mantle, just as on Earth.

"Venus was a moist greenhouse, where life flourished..."

She found talus slopes, rubble left by crumbled rocks. It would require care, but this type of climb wasn't so unfamiliar to Carole. She had hiked in places in the Rocky Mountains that were rather like this, places where chemical weathering seemed to dominate, even on Earth. But the depth would push the envelope of her suit's design. And, of course, there was nobody here to help her up. So she took care not to fall.

After a couple of kilometers she paused for breath. She looked down, across kilometers of steeply sloping rock, to the Planum below.

She thought she could see something new, emerging from the murk: a long dark line, oddly straight, that disappeared here and there among folds in the rock, only to emerge once more farther along. As if somebody had reached down with a straightedge and scoured a deep dark cut into these hot rocks.

There was something beside the line, squat and dark, like a beetle. It seemed to her to be moving along the line. But perhaps that was her imagination.

She continued her careful climb downward.

"...But then the visitors came in their drifting interstellar moonlets," Nemoto had said. "And they cared nothing for Venus or its life-forms. They just wanted to steal the moon, to propagate their rocky spore. So they stopped Venus spinning."

At the base of the cliffs she paused for a few minutes, letting her heartbeat subside to something like normal, sipping water.

The black line was a cable. It was maybe two meters thick, featureless and black, and it was held a meter from the ground by crude, sturdy pylons of rock.

"How do you despin a planet?" Nemoto whispered. "We can think of a number of ways. You could bombard it with asteroids, for instance. But I think Venus was turned into a giant Dyson engine. Carole, I have observed cables like this all over the planet, wrapped east to west. They are fragmentary, broken -- after all they are eight hundred million years old -- but they still exist in stretches hundreds of kilometers long. Once, I would wager, the surface of Venus was wrapped in a cage of cables that followed the lines of latitude, like geographical markings on a schoolroom globe..."

She pressed her lab box against the cable. She even ran her hand along it, cautiously, but could feel nothing through the layers of her suit.

She began to walk alongside the cable. Some of the pylons were missing, others badly eroded. It was remarkable any of this stuff had lasted so long, she thought; it must be strongly resistant to Venus's corrosive air.

"Electric currents would be passed through the cables," Nemoto whispered. "The circulating currents would generate an intense magnetic field. This field would be used to couple the planet to its moon -- perhaps the moon was dragged within its Roche limit, deliberately broken apart by tides.

"Thus they used the planet's spin energy to break up its moon.

"They rebuilt the fragments into their habitats, their rocky bubbles. The moonlets would be hurled out of the system, each of them robbing Venus of a little more of its spin. I wonder how long it took -- thousands, millions of years? And, as they worked, they waited for Venus to bake itself to death.

"The climate of Venus was destabilized by the spin-down, you see," Nemoto said. "It got hotter. There must have been a paucity of rain, a terrible drought, at last no rain at all... And finally, the oceans themselves started to evaporate.

"When all the oceans were gone -- life must already have been extinguished -- the water in the air started to drift to the top of the atmosphere. There, it was broken up by sunlight. The hydrogen escaped to space, and the oxygen and remnant water made sulphuric acid in the clouds.

"And that was what the moonlet builders wanted, you see:
the acid.
They mined the acid out of the ruined air, perhaps with ships like our profac crawlers.

"It's an efficient scheme, if you think it over. All you need is a fat, fast-spinning planet with a moon, and you get a source of moonlet ships, a way to launch them, and even a sulphuric acid mine. Venus, despun, was ruined. But
they
didn't care. They had what they wanted.

"We are lucky they did not select Earth. Perhaps our Moon was too large, too distant; perhaps the Sun was too far away..."

But they didn't finish the job, Carole thought. What great catastrophe, eight hundred million years ago, stopped them? Were some of Venus's great impact craters the wounds left by remnants of that vanished moon falling from the sky, uncontrolled -- or even the scars of some disastrous war?

For Venus, Nemoto said, things got worse still. When all its water was lost, plate tectonics halted. The shifting continents seized up, like an engine run out of oil. The planet's interior heat was trapped, built up -- until it was released catastrophically. "Mass volcanism erupted. There were immense lava floods, giant new volcanoes. Much of the surface fractured, crumpled, melted. And the carbon dioxide locked up in the rocks began to pump into the atmosphere, thickening it further..."

Something was moving, directly ahead of her.

It was the beetlelike thing that she had observed from the cliff. And it was working its way along the cable, gouging at it with complex tools she couldn't make out, scoring it deeply.

It was a gray-black form the size of a small car. It was as tall as she was, its surface featureless, returning glinted highlights of Venus's complex sky. And it was based on a dodecahedral core.

"Hello," she said.
"You
haven't been here for eight hundred million years."

"Gaijin technology," Nemoto whispered when she saw the image. "It is here to scavenge. Carole, this ancient cable is a superconductor, working at Venusian temperatures. Remarkable. Even the Gaijin have nothing like this. And what," she hissed, "do they intend to do with it? Which of our planets or moons will
they
wrap up, like a Christmas parcel?"

An alarm chimed softly in Carole's helmet. She must soon turn back, if she was to complete her long climb back to the lander in safety.

From here she could see the lower plains, the true floor of Venus, the great basalt ocean that covered the planet, still kilometers below her altitude. She longed to go farther, to climb down and explore. But she knew she must not. My mission is over, she realized. Here, at this moment; I have come as far as I can, and must turn back.