The Mountain Cage (45 page)

Andrew’s hand was reaching for the brass lamp near him. He pulled out the cord. He seemed to be moving very slowly. Thérèse lifted a hand to her face. He picked up the lamp. The kobold was pivoting on one foot. He saw its face as he leaped, bringing the base of the lamp down on its head.

It squeaked. The wand flew from its hand, clattering across the floor. Andrew hit it again and it was still as it fell, its limbs stiff. He dropped the lamp and began to shake.

Thérèse was breathing heavily. “You took a chance,” she said. “You really took a chance.” She knelt and began to crawl over the floor. “I have to find that weapon.”

“Use your light.”

“I lost my light.”

Andrew remembered Silas. He went to the door. Thérèse was slapping the floor. He breathed the night air and smelled dirt and pollen. Opening the door cautiously, he went out on the porch; his skin prickled as a cool breeze touched him.

The blond kobold was below, in front of the porch. Silas was running across the barren yard, kicking up dust. The troll was blocking him, leaping from side to side and waving its long arms as if playing with the boy. Silas darted to the left, but the creature was too quick for him. It herded him, driving him back toward the house. The boy hopped and danced, coming closer to Andrew.

Andrew came down the steps, pausing on the bottom one. The kobold saw him. He could hear Silas panting; there were shiny streaks on his friend’s face. The troll put its hands on the ground and swung between them on its arms, lifting its knees to its chest. It grinned, showing its crooked teeth. Then Andrew saw Emily.

The woman had come around the side of the house and now stood to Andrew’s left, watching the pursuit. Her white dress shone in the moonlight and fluttered in the breeze. She raised her hands as if casting a spell, and Andrew saw that she was holding a wand.

He opened his mouth to cry out. His throat locked; he rasped as breath left him. The woman pointed her wand. The beam struck Silas in the chest. He fell. Andrew heard a scream.

He stared numbly at his friend. A black spot was covering Silas, flowing over his chest; his eyes gazed heavenward. “Silas?” Andrew murmured. He swayed on the steps. “Silas?” The troll stood up; the kobold stood near Silas’s head. Dust had settled in the boy’s thick hair.

Emily was walking toward him, still holding the wand. She was smiling; the blue stone of her Bond seemed to wink. Andrew faced her, unable to move. His limbs were heavy; invisible hands pressed against him. He saw one white arm rise.

A beam brightened the night. Andrew gasped. Emily was falling. Andrew clutched at his abdomen and spun around, almost falling from the step. Thérèse was climbing through the window; her feet hit the porch. She came to the railing and leaned over it, firing at Emily with her weapon. The white dress was stained. The kobold raised its wand. Andrew dived for it as it fired, and heard a cry. He wrested the weapon from it and knocked the creature aside.

Thérèse was screaming. She continued to fire at Emily. One beam struck the woman in the leg; another burned through her head. One arm jerked. The stone on Emily’s Bond was black. Thérèse kept shooting, striking the ground near the body.

His vision blurred for a moment. He found himself next to the girl. “Thérèse, stop.” She cried out as he reached for her and held out her leftarm. Her hand was a burned, bloody claw; he gasped and touched her right shoulder. She tore herself from him and went down the steps to Silas. She knelt in the dirt, patting his face with her right hand.

“I was too late,” she said. She was crying. The kobold sat up, rubbing its head. Andrew gripped his wand, aimed it at the android, then let his arm drop. The troll scampered to the side of its dead mistress. It lifted her in its arms and held her. A sudden gust whipped Andrew’s hair; he caught the metallic smell of blood in the summer’s dust.

Joan tried to stop Andrew at the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I want to say good-bye to Thérèse.”

Joan frowned. “I don’t think you should.”

“She’s my friend.”

“She killed two people.” Joan’s voice tripped over the word
kill
. “She’s very ill.”

“She’s not. She did what she had to do. She had to kill Emily.”

Joan stepped back. “That woman was very disturbed, Andrew. She needed help, reconditioning. She was ill.”

“She wasn’t ill. She was going to die, and so she wanted other people to die, too, that’s all.” He thought of Emily’s body in the dirt, and his throat tightened; Thérèse had cursed their rescuers when they destroyed Emily’s kobold and troll. The troll had looked at Andrew before it died, and he had thought he saw awareness in its eyes.

Joan took him by the shoulders. Her eyes were narrowed; her lips were pulled back over her teeth. “You’ll forget all this. The psychologist will be here tomorrow, and that will be that. You’ll think differently about this incident.”

He twisted away and went out the door. Dao was outside. He let Andrew pass.

A tent had been put up at the bottom of the hill, a temporary shelter for Thérèse and the two psychologists who were now with her. They had questioned the girl and interrogated him; they had set up a tent because Joan had been afraid to have the girl in her house. Now they would take Thérèse away. The evil in his world would be smoothed over, explained and rationalized. Thérèse would not be sent to an asteroid; only people who were hopelessly death-loving were sent there, and even they could change, given enough time. That was what the female psychologist had told him. They had high hopes for Thérèse; she was young enough to heal. They would help her construct a new personality. The mental scars would disappear; the cruelty would be forgotten. Andrew thought of it, and it seemed like death; the Thérèse he knew would no longer exist.

Thérèse came out of the tent as he approached. The brown-skinned woman followed her; the red-haired man was near their hovercraft, putting things away. Thérèse reached for Andrew’s hand and held it for a moment before releasing it. The psychologist lingered near them.

“I want to talk to him alone,” Thérèse said. “Don’t worry, you’ll find out all my secrets soon enough.” The woman withdrew. Thérèse led Andrew inside the tent.

They sat down on an air mattress. The girl looked down at the Bond on her right wrist. “Can’t get this one off so easily,” she muttered. Her mouth twisted. She gestured with her bandaged left hand. “They’re going to fix my hand first,” she went on. “It’ll be just the way it was, no scars.”

He said, “I don’t want you to go.”

“It won’t be so bad. They told me I’d be happier. It’s probably true. They’re nice people.”

Andrew glanced at her. “Ben might clone Silas. That’s what he told Dao. He’s thinking about it. He’s going to go away.”

“It won’t be Silas.”

“I know.”

Thérèse shook back her hair. “I guess I won’t remember much of this. It’ll be like a dream.”

“I don’t want you to forget. I won’t. I promise. I don’t want to forget you, Thérèse. I don’t care. You’re the only friend I have now.”

She frowned. “Make some new friends. Don’t just wait around for someone else to tell you what to do.” She paused. “I could have just aimed at her arm, you know. Then she would have still been alive.”

“She was dying anyway.”

“They could have helped her eventually. She was dying very slowly. I didn’t have to kill Rani, either.” Her eyes were wide; she stared past him. “I didn’t. He was down, he begged me to stop. I kept hitting him with the poker until his skull caved in. I wanted to be sure he wouldn’t come after me. I was glad, too. I was glad he was dead and I was still alive.”

“No,” Andrew said.

“Stop it.” She dug her fingers into his shoulder. “You said you didn’t want to forget me. If you don’t see me the way I am, you’ve forgotten me already. Do you understand?”

He nodded, and she released him. His eyes stung; he blinked. “Listen, Andrew. We’ll be all right. We’ll grow up, and we’ll be alive forever. When everyone lives forever, then sooner or later they have to meet everyone else, don’t they? If we live long enough, we’re bound to see each other again, it’ll be like starting all over.”

He did not reply.

“It’s true, you know it’s true. Stop looking like that.” She jabbed him with her elbow. “Say good-bye, Andrew. I don’t want you hanging around when we leave. I won’t be able to stand it.”

“Good-bye, Thérèse.”

“Good-bye.” She touched his arm. He got up and lifted the tent flap. He wanted to look back at her; instead, he let the flap drop behind him.

He climbed the hill, trying to imagine endless life. Joan and Dao were on the porch, waiting for him. He thought of Silas. You’ll always be afraid, just like them; that was what his friend had said. No, Andrew told himself; not any more. His friend’s face was suddenly before him, vivid; Joan and Dao were only distant, ghostly shapes, trying to face up to forever.

Afterword to “The Summer’s Dust”:

Immortality—as a hope, a promise, or a punishment—has to be among the most persistent of human concerns, while the knowledge that we are all eventually going to die seems to be at the heart of everything we do. Death is the goad that drives us to whatever achievements we win. Many people look past this certain end and choose to believe in a life after death; unbeliever that I am, this hope strikes me as an extreme if all too common form of being in denial.

One consolation for our limited human lives has traditionally been knowing, or at least hoping, that others of our kind, our children and descendants, would live on after we were gone. Some have speculated that in a world where human lives could be indefinitely prolonged, there would likely be fewer children. Instead, people could live out various lives themselves instead of passing on their hopes to their progeny, and if all of those long-lived people kept having children at our rate, the population would explode.

What would life be like for children in such a society, a world where perhaps only they are growing, maturing, and changing? What might happen if, in spite of all the safeguards people might employ to protect themselves and preserve their long lives, death intruded on the world of these children? “The Summer’s Dust” grew out of these questions.

DREAM OF VENUS

Hassan Petrovich Maksutov’s grandfather was the first to point out Venus to him, when Hassan was five years old. His family and much of his clan had moved to the outskirts of Jeddah by then, and his grandfather had taken him outside to view the heavens.

The night sky was a black canopy of tiny flickering flames; Hassan had imagined suddenly growing as tall as a djinn and reaching out to touch a star. Venus did not flicker like other stars, but shone steadily on the horizon in the hour before dawn. Hassan had not known then that he would eventually travel to that planet, but he had delighted in looking up at the beacon that signified humankind’s greatest endeavor.

Twenty years after that first sighting, Hassan was gazing down at Venus from one of the ten domed Islands that floated in the upper reaches of the planet’s poisonous atmosphere. These Cytherian Islands, as they were known (after the island of Cythera where the goddess Aphrodite had been worshipped in the ancient world), were vast platforms that had been built on top of massive metal cells filled with helium and then covered with dirt and soil. After each Island had been enclosed by an impermeable dome, the surfaces were gardened, and by the time Hassan was standing on a raised platform at the edge of Island Two and peering into the veiled darkness below, the Islands had for decades been gardens of trees, flowers, grassy expanses, and dwellings that housed the people who had come to Venus to be a part of the Project, Earth’s effort to terraform her sister planet.

The Venus Project, as Hassan had known ever since childhood, was the greatest feat of engineering humankind had ever attempted, an enterprise that had already taken the labor of millions. Simply constructing the Parasol, the umbrella that shielded Venus from the sun, was an endeavor that had dwarfed the building of the Pyramids (where his father and mother had taken him to view those majestic crumbling monuments) and China’s Great Wall (which he had visited during a break from his studies at the University of Chimkent). The Parasol had grown into a vast metallic flower as wide in diameter as Venus herself, in order to allow that hot and deadly world to cool. Venus would remain cloaked in the Parasol’s shadow for centuries to come.

Hassan’s grandfather had explained to him, during their sighting of Venus, that what he was seeing was in fact not the planet itself, but the reflected light of the Parasol. To the old man, this made the sight even more impressive, since the great shield was humankind’s accomplishment, but Hassan had felt a twinge of disappointment. Even now, as he stood on Island Two, the planet below was veiled in darkness, hidden from view.

The Venus of past millennia, with a surface hot enough to melt lead, an atmosphere thick with sulfur dioxide, and an atmospheric pressure that would have crushed a person standing on its barren surface, had already undergone changes. Hydrogen, siphoned off from Saturn, had been carried to Venus in a steady stream of tanks and then released into the atmosphere, where it was combining with the free oxygen produced by the changes in the Venusian environment to form water. The Cytherian clouds had been seeded with a genetically engineered strain of algae that fed on the sulfuric acid and expelled it in the form of copper and iron sulfides. The Venus of the past now existed more in memory than in reality; the Venus of the future, that green and fertile planet that would become a second Earth and a new home for humankind, was still a dream.