2312

Kiran on Venus

The moment Kiran was alone with Shukra, Shukra said to him, “We’re going to have to put you through some tests, my boy.”

“What kind of tests?”

“All kinds.”

Three big men showed up to escort them across a few boulevards of Colette, and Kiran saw there was no question of him doing anything but what he was told. As they entered a building with bay windows overlooking a street corner, he tried to see the street signs and remember where they were. Eighth and Oak. Although the tree across the intersection was a willow.

“Tell me again why Swan brought you here?” Shukra asked as they went into the building.

“I helped her avoid being kidnapped, when she was out in my neighborhood. She wanted to return the favor.”

Shukra said, “You asked to come here?”

“Sort of.”

Shukra shook his head a few times. “So now you are a spy.”

“What do you mean?”

Shukra glanced at him. “You’re a spy for her, at this point, whether you know it or not. We’ll find out with our tests. After that you’ll be a spy for me.”

“Why should she need a spy here?”

“She was very close to the Lion of Mercury, and since the Lion’s death, she has started traveling in the way that the Lion would have. And the Lion always kept a big cadre of spies here. So let’s see what the tests say.”

Kiran found his heart was beating hard, but the three big men closed around him, and there was no choice but to be escorted into another room. This one had the look of a medical clinic. The tests in the end resembled medical exams more than anything else, which was a great relief to discover. Although when medical exams are the good option, it is not a good situation.

At the end of that day he was escorted back into Shukra’s presence. Shukra examined the console that presumably contained Kiran’s results. When he spoke, it was to Kiran’s escorts. “He looks clean, but somehow I doubt it. For now, let’s use him for bait.”

After that Kiran was assigned to a Chinese work unit, which lived together in a building near the city’s crater rim, and left the city together almost daily to do work outside. The unit’s members had no control over their lives; they went where they were told, did what they were told, ate what they were given. It was almost like being at home.

A stupid little translation belt Swan had given to him was now the only company Kiran had. He got a lot of puzzled second glances when he used the thing to facilitate communication, but he also had a few ten-minute conversations through it that were much better than nothing. Mostly, however, he was on his own in a throng, doing whatever came up for his team that day. He never saw Shukra again after the battery of tests, which made him feel like he had failed—although one day it occurred to him that maybe he had passed.

In any case there was endless work to be done, almost all of it outside Colette, in the perpetual blizzard that the Big Rain had turned into. Thick drifts of snow were landing on the new dry ice seas before the latter had been completely covered with foamed rock, and this was creating a problem. Every day big teams had to go out and operate gargantuan bulldozers and snowplows to clear the snow off the dry ice, so that foamed rock brigades could then cover the ice before more snow fell on it. It was said that the foam job would take ten more years to finish, but Kiran had also heard one year, and someone else said a hundred years. No one knew for sure, and with his belt it was hard to follow the discussions at the dining table after meals, when sometimes workmates would try to do the calculations themselves on their wristpads. Ten years kept coming up. Talk about dead-end jobs! He needed to improve his Chinese.

At night he slept in a dorm. This was the most interesting part, because people were packed in on long mattresses that his belt called matrazenlager—essentially mattresses as long as the room, with numbers on the headboards marking nominal slots for people, a situation leading to a fair bit of sex in the dark, sometimes even including him. Then up in the morning, eat in a cafeteria, get in a line to get sent out onto the endless plain in rovers, or put in helicopters the size of aircraft carriers to be carried out to the dry ice sea to operate bulldozers, waldoes, snowblowers (the so-called dragons), super-zambonis, and ice cutters much like the asphalt- and concrete-cutting vehicles back in Jersey, but a hundred times bigger. After a few weeks he could operate any of these. They weren’t very complicated; really you told the AI what to do for the most part. It was like being captain of a ship. A day’s work by a team of a thousand would clear many square kilometers of dry ice, and on the horizon the black moving buildings that spread the foamed rock followed inexorably. The far shore of this part of the ice sea was said to be six hundred kilometers away.

Then for a matter of some weeks he worked in a monumental waldo, kicking free what they called stegosaur plates, then carrying them over to the bed of a giant truck. Waldo work was always demanding—it was full-body movement, like dancing—not physically hard, but as it magnified your every motion, it required very close attention and focus to move the waldo in just the way you wanted it to go. So it could be interesting work or just a matter of lifting and carrying, but either way it left you fried.

At the ends of these days he tried to work on his Chinese. No one he met spoke English, so his little translation belt was his best teacher, but it was hard. He would say things to it and then listen to the translation and try to say it back. But when he said it back in Chinese, and it translated what he’d said back into English, it never came out right. He said, “My radar is broken,” in exactly the Chinese he thought he had heard, and it translated back to him “immediate open air meeting.” He tried “Where do you live?” and it came back as “Your lotus has interpolated.”

“If only!” he said, laughing bleakly. “I’d like my lotus to interpolate, but how?”

Clearly he must be sounding crazy to the people he talked to. He was doing something wrong, but what?

“It is a hard language,” one of his dorm mates said when he complained. He tried to memorize that properly.

As it was, his translator was his best friend. They talked a lot. He hoped to start getting more out of it soon. Saying “hello” and “how are you?” and such was working better and better with the people he interacted with. And they were getting friendlier about talking slow.

The workers continued to chip away at the monumental tasks set before them, tasks thousands of times bigger than similar jobs on Earth. But if the job was shoveling snow, was that a good thing?

Once he sent a message to Swan to say he was glad to hear she had survived the attack on Terminator, and in it he mentioned that he never saw Shukra anymore. A message came back a few weeks later: Try Lakshmi. With a Venusian cloud address.

He looked into this and found that Lakshmi was a name that caused people to go silent and look away. A big power, based over in Cleopatra; an ally of Shukra’s, or an enemy—people didn’t really know, or didn’t want to say.

So: maybe Swan wanted to shift her informant to a place closer to the action. Or maybe she was just trying to help.

Or maybe he was just on his own.