The Sky People Page 3

  "Sort of an acadaemogorsk combined with frontier Deadwood," an English voice said from among the passengers.

  Marc nodded, chuckling. He'd been a little surprised himself when the final training courses had put so much emphasis on things like blacksmithing and carpentry, but it made sense when you remembered how far away Earth was and how much it cost to ship anything this far. Every ounce counted, and every ounce acquired on Venus meant spaceship cargo freed up for something that couldn't possibly be made here, like scientific instruments.

  Marc went on, "And that's the chapel; the denominations use it on a rotating basis. And here's HQ," he concluded.

  That was the largest of the buildings—three stories of adobe with the viga-beams that supported the floors poking through the whitewash, in an E-shape around courtyards, with a fountain and an arcade of tree trunks at the front. People bustled in and out, and traders squatted by blankets bearing their goods, everything from jewelry to colorful dyed cloth and cooking spices.

  Marc pulled the joystick back to the neutral position and pressed the park button that stimulated the animal's pleasure center; it put its head down and began to drool again. Ceratopsians were too invincibly stupid to learn much, but they would stand still if it made them feel very good. That let him jump down from the driver's seat and put the ladder in place. A Hispanic woman in her early thirties appeared in the main doorway, waving a clipboard.

  Marc gestured towards her. "Dr. Maria Feldman will give you all the standard familiarization lecture and assign quarters. I'm afraid we're very shorthanded here, so I'll be leaving you in her capable hands."

  "This way, people! This way!" she called.

  The passengers began to file down. As they did, Marc noticed one of them had slipped out and was handing Cynthia down from the foremost seat; he was a man of about Marc's own age, but two inches taller, blond, blue-eyed, and handsome in a way both rugged and somehow smooth at the edges. He gave a toothy smile and squeezed hard as he shook hands. His eyes went a little wider as the Cajun squeezed back with carefully calculated force.

  "Wing Commander Christopher Blair, RAF," the blond man said in an excruciatingly Etonian voice; he was the one who'd compared the place to an EastBloc research settlement crossed with a frontier town. "Anthropology and linguistics, lighter-than-air pilot as well… as are you, I understand? Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant."

  "The pleasure's mutual," Marc said through slightly gritted teeth, surprised at the intensity of his sudden dislike.

  Oh, well, they've all been together on the Carson for a quarter of a year, he thought as he climbed back into the howdah and watched the two of them walk side by side into HQ, chatting easily. I just liked her on first acquaintance…

  In theory half the personnel here were supposed to be female. In practice it was hard to be precise about it with such a small population, and there was a slight but noticeable surplus of males, particularly among the younger, unmarried residents. It was annoying as hell and it meant that the single men among the Old Bulls had a built-in advantage.

  He headed the ceratopsian down towards the docks, shouting reminders to get out of the way occasionally when it looked as if the bells weren't enough. Most of the traffic was pedestrians, including the odd kid, and once a Kartahownian noble in a fancy, gold-trimmed shamboo chariot, gawking around in his saffron tunic and gaudy barbaric jewelry, and gawking hardest of all at a 'saur doing what people told it to. He nearly gawked too long. A ceratopsian just didn't stop, start, or turn quickly.

  It was a relief to turn right, eastward, towards the stables, storage, and workshops out on the eastern edge of town; that was usually far enough for the stenches to not bother people. The prevailing winds blew south to north here in the summer, and in from the ocean in winter. Iced ceratopsians didn't need much stabling; when you pressed the right button, a ceratopsian felt increasingly bad if it walked away from the fixed broadcaster. That kept them quiet even when their instincts said they should be migrating to the highlands for the summer. There were ditches and fences made of a lattice of two-foot-thick tree trunks as backup, but privately Marc doubted they'd hold the beasts if the signal ever failed.

  Real split-rail corrals confined the domestic tharg and churr they'd bought from the locals, and beyond them were tilled fields. Marc noted where a bustle of construction work was adding to the barns and storage sheds, and caught a strong whiff from the steeping vats where mammal and dinosaur hide was being tanned. They could have bought everything from the Kartahownians, of course, but sacred Policy said otherwise.

  Okay, it's a fairly smart policy, he thought. Relations with Kartahown's kings were good, but with the city as a whole were at best… "fraught" was the word he'd heard General Clarke use. I'd be less grudging if it all didn't take up so much research time.

  He turned draught-beast and howdah over to the staff, slung his rifle across his back, and walked over to the slaughterhouse that also served as a processing point for specimens. It was cool inside, cool enough to dry his sweat and even raise a few goose bumps, courtesy of a wind-vent system. It didn't even smell too bad, since the blood-beetles took care of scraps—and of the meat, unless you took elaborate precautions. Dr. Samuel Feldman, doctor of paleontology and ethnology, was watching while a crew disassembled the hung-up carcasses of six tharg Marc and the other Rangers had shot for tonight's Welcome-to-Venus barbeque, the giant wild variety that could weigh in at a ton and a half.

  Feldman looked as much like a rumpled, absentminded professor as it was possible for anyone who made the Jamestown selection to do. Mostly that meant he forgot to shave sometimes and never quite got around to growing a beard. His pants and pocketed shirt jacket were the same as those of nearly everyone else and he had twenty-thirty vision, but somehow the lab coat and glasses were there as an intangible spiritual essence; for the rest, he was a short, fairly stocky thirty-something man with dark, curling hair, brown eyes, and a round, big-nosed face, and the body of a wickedly effective soccer goalie, which was exactly what he was in his off-hours.

  "You know, dis ting is definitely a bovine," he said in purest Brooklyn, an accent that hadn't disappeared even while he was earning his first degree from New York University and after the time he'd spent at Stanford.

  "Certainly tastes like beef. But come on, Doc. Billions of years of separate evolution here!"

  It wasn't the first time they'd had this discussion; tharg was the commonest type of meat in the local diet after pork. Feldman prodded a finger towards the big animal whose flayed body hung head-down from a wooden hook over a big tub of oat-hulls.

  "The anatomy is just too damned similar for a doubt."

  "Mais, I think it looks a lot like a buffalo, me. Call it a bovinoid?"

  "Or a tall, mean wisent," Feldman said, smiling. "But no, it's not 'bovinoid.' Clade bovidae, genus bos. This thing is descended from the same ancestors as the ones we make brisket out of back home. It's even kosher—it divideth its hooves and cheweth the fucking cud!"

  "It's a buffalo that can fly interplanetary distances? I know they're pretty flatulent when they've been eating those breadnut things, but not to escape velocity, I think."

  Feldman's smile turned into a grin, then died. "Dammit, Marc, this is driving me nuts. What we need is a way to directly compare DNA… they're working on it, but it's going to be a while. Maybe we shouldn't have put all our R and D money into rocket science for the past thirty years. The serum immunology reactions, though… dammit…"

  Marc nodded; he didn't have the older man's terrier obsession, but it was something to worry at, and they'd come here for knowledge—officially.

  And to make sure the EastBloc don't snaffle off a whole planet, and to taunt the Euros once again for following de Gaulle into a blind alley. Everyone had expected wonders on Mars and Venus. Nobody had expected what they found. He ventured, "Panspermia? Microbes on meteors?"

  The scientist shook his head. "Not a prayer. Okay, say life gets its start from complex molecules fr
om space. We've found complex molecules in space that look like amino acids. That could get you something that's generally similar, starting with single-celled organisms in primordial oceans. Bugs on rocks, yeah, that would make things a bit more generally similar, say in the structure of genes and chromosomes. But evolution's a chaotic process; you get general similarities, but not identities. Hell, even on Earth, dolphins aren't fish and seals aren't dolphins and birds aren't bats. No way a couple of billion years of random evolution could reproduce, oh—"

  He paused and caught a buzzing fly on the wing with the same smooth snap that he used to stop a soccer ball, then held it out in a cage of fingers, reciting in a singsong tone:

  "Two-winged flying insects with distinctive wing venation: spurious vein usually present between R and M; cells R5 and Ml closed, resulting in a vein that runs parallel to posterior margin of the wing; anal cell closed near wing margin. Hoverflies, to you. The only difference between this and Syrphid hoverflies on Earth is that it's as big as your little finger—and that's because the air here has a higher partial pressure of oxygen. You could get bugs here the size of Chihuahuas and I suspect that in the warmer areas you do."

  He released the insect and stopped the butchering of the tharg for a second to pry things open.

  "Look at that and that. Look at the structure of the shoulder joint! And the digestive tract's not just grossly similar; it's similar in detail. It's not a different structure developed to do roughly the same thing; it's the same structure doing exactly the same thing; with only very minor differences. It's no more different from a Jersey cow than the cow is from a water buffalo. It's a ruminant, fer Chrissakes!"

  "There's grass here, too," Marc pointed out.

  Feldman began to run his hands through his hair, then noticed the blood on them and poured a dipperful of water over them, wiping down on a coarse burlap sack hanging from a peg.

  "Yeah. And that's way too similar to our grass."

  "Mais, then the evidence would suggest that our theories of evolution are wrong," Marc argued. "Maybe separate evolutionary paths can reproduce fine details, at least when they get the same initial conditions. Remember, evidence first, theory second."

  Feldman glared at him balefully. "But the facts are supposed to make sense. We've got to get started on a good survey of the geological strata and fossil record for this planet. Bovines date back about twenty million years on Earth. If we could compare the fossils—"

  "Collected by all one hundred and forty-six of us?" Marc asked reasonably, and grinned inwardly as the paleontologist kicked the hanging carcass with concentrated venom. "Of course, maybe the God-did-it crowd is right—"

  "Them!"

  Feldman started swearing; when he switched to Yiddish, Marc had to fight to keep the grin inward.

  He's a good boss, him, but sometimes I just can't resist.

  Venus, EastBloc Station Kusnetsov—Low Venus Orbit

  The upper stage of the EastBloc shuttle Riga was an elongated wedge with two vertical stabilizers at the rear. Its rocket engines were strictly for the ascent to orbit, when its first stage carried it to twenty-five thousand meters and Mach 3. It was designed to dead-stick to a landing, using its belly as the heat-shield and lifting body. Captain and pilot Franziskus Binkis floated in through the docking tunnel that clamped to the lower spindle of the wheel-and-axle configuration of the station and sighed in relief as he deftly dogged the hatch and then pushed himself down to strap into the central pilot's station. There wasn't really any difference in the stale, recycled taste of the dry air with its tang of ozone, since the Riga had been docked here for three days, but his lungs and nose insisted it felt more alive.

  His glance skipped over gauges and readouts. Most were old-fashioned analogue devices, it being resentfully accepted that the Yanki were ahead in plasma-screen technology, even with the latest Chinese improvements. Officially, digital readouts and touch screens were regarded as unnecessary luxuries. Li was ready at the engineer's console, and Nininze in the copilot's seat.

  "Glad to get the cargo stowed," the Georgian said. "It must be important, not to be sent down with a cargo pod to Cosmograd. I wonder what it is?"

  The pilot grunted. It was important, which was exactly why Nininze shouldn't have asked that question. But the Georgian was short, dark, lively, and talkative—exactly what a Georgian was supposed to be like. Binkis knew he was an equally archetypical Lithuanian in looks, tall and ash-blond with pale gray eyes, and just like the stereotype he was also closemouthed. Li was from Canton, and doll-pretty; she was also even more silent than the pilot, except where her machinery was concerned, and he was fairly sure she reported to Base Security.

  "Part of it is computer parts," Binkis said. "Let's get the checklist completed."

  Li and Nininze nodded with a chorus of, "Yes, Captain." The "Comrade" was best left off these days except on formal occasions.

  Otherwise you were likely to be suspected of left-deviationist hankerings for the old days, which wouldn't do your career any good. A sensible man kept up with the changes.

  "Poor Alexi," Nininze said, after they finished the run-through on the maneuvering jets. "Three more weeks up here, and not even any brandy!"

  Binkis grinned as he watched Li finish the checklist on the navigational computer. He happened to know that a friend on the last visit of the nuclear-boost ship Zuhkov had left several bottles of quite good Stolichnaya with Alexi in return for a small stuffed pterodactyl, priceless on the black market back home if you could get it past the inspectors, or cut one of them in on the deal. Anyone who thought they could forbid liquor traffic in an organization founded by Russians was crazy. That didn't stop Security from trying, of course, and even trying to prevent people from making their own untaxed hooch down planetside, which showed you how in touch with reality they were. Of course, the current Security chief was a German named Bergman, with a spring-steel poker up his arse.

  He'd been a compromise after the Chinese wouldn't accept a Russian and the Russians balked at having the commandant and the police general Chinese.

  "Cosmograd Control, this is Riga-alpha, reporting all systems functional for descent," Binkis said.

  On the second try, the message went through. Venus had a turbulent atmosphere with a great deal of radio noise; it made longdistance communications awkward. He used Russian, which was still the common language of the EastBloc space service.

  He'd also meticulously checked everything twice, most particularly the parts that were the Station chief's responsibilities.

  Alexi is a good man to have a drink with, but at seventh and last, he is a Russian, and thinks machinery will perform if you give it a good kick. A Russian is a Mongol with blue eyes—halfway to a black-arse.

  There was the odd token Tajik or Uzbek, but the core of the program was still Slav, with a fair sprinkling of minor Soviet nationalities: Baits like him, people from the Caucasus like Nininze, plus plenty from the other Warsaw Pact countries… and an ever-increasing percentage of Chinese. It was all supposed to show true internationalism at work. He liked the Chinese more than the Russians on the whole; they were better at detail work, and they took the new regulations on private initiative to heart rather than grumbling at them. Since a couple of them had started restaurants, you could finally get a decent meal in Cosmograd that you didn't cook yourself, and it was also now possible to get a broken light replaced without waiting three weeks.

  The accented voice of the Hungarian duty officer groundside crackled through the speakers: "Cosmograd Control here. You are cleared for landing, Captain Binkis. Transmitting code."

  "Spacebo" Binkis said

  For a moment he looked at the great mottled disk of Venus through the windows, thick white cloud-masses and thinner upper-level haze and streaks of blue below. Coming home, Jadviga, he thought, and punched the execute button.

  A loud clunk sounded from above as the docking collar disengaged. They were already weightless, but there was a peculiar feeling in
the inner ear as the big gyroscopes whined and twisted the nose of the Riga to the proper alignment.

  "Commence," he began. Then a startled obscenity: "Pisau!"

  The ripple of action on the dials showed the firing sequence for the retro-rockets! "Li, override that!"

  The Chinese woman's hands danced on the flight control console. "Negative, Captain," she said tonelessly. "The flight computer is not responding."

  Binkis slapped the main manual override switch. He couldn't do a reentry burn by hand, but he could stop it until they'd figured out what had gone wrong. Nothing… and then the huge, impalpable hand slamming him back into his seat as the retro-rockets blasted and the view ahead vanished in a haze of burning gas.

  Trilinkas sau ant kelio triesk! he screamed mentally at the useless controls. Fold yourself in three and shit!

  Then with an effort that made sweat break out on his forehead: "Li, see what trajectory this puts us on."

  For as the rockets killed some of its orbital velocity, the Riga had begun to fall.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 16th Edition University of Chicago Press, 1988

  VENUS: History of observation

  … in 1927 and 1928 ultraviolet photographs were taken by the American astronomers William H. Wright and Frank E. Ross. The first studies of the infrared spectrum of Venus, by Walter S. Adams and Theodore Dunham (also of the United States) in 1932, showed that the atmosphere of the planet was possibly an oxygen-nitrogen one. Observations in the microwave of the spectrum, beginning in earnest in the late 1940s, provided the first evidence of the Earth-like surface temperatures.

  The greatest advances in the early study of Venus were achieved through the use of unmanned spacecraft. The era of spacecraft exploration of the planets began with the Soviet Pioneer orbiter mission to Venus in 1960, which placed a spacecraft in orbit around the planet and sent four entry probes deep into the Venusian atmosphere. The entry probes provided data on atmospheric structure and composition, while the orbiter observed from above. The orbiter also provided the first high-quality map of Venus' surface topography and resulted in the naming of the continents, oceans, and major islands. Most important, it also provided the first positive indications of intelligent life…