The Mountain Cage (47 page)

“It won’t hurt to have such experiences on your record,” Pyotr had told Hassan, “as long as it’s clear that this mind-tour business is just a hobby. But it isn’t the kind of profession that could make a Linker of you, or give you any chance in politics.” His father had, for a while, made him feel ashamed of his earlier ambition.

“It’s not that I’m doing you any special favors, Hassan,” Muhammad said. “It’s just that we don’t have many people here who could put together even a preliminary visual sketch of a mind-tour, and Administrator Pavel thinks having people associated with the Project doing the work might impart a new perspective, something more original, something that isn’t just the vast spectacle interspersed with inspiring dioramas that most mind-tours about the Venus Project are.” He paused. “Anyway, it’ll be something other than the routine work you’ve been doing.”

Hassan found himself warming to the prospect Constructing a mind-tour, putting together the kind of experience that would make anyone, however humble his position, proud to be even a small part of a society that could transform a planet—this was a challenge he was certain he could meet. There was also an ironic satisfaction in knowing that the pursuit his father had scorned might become his means of winning Administrator Pavel’s favor.

Miriam Lucea-Noyes was a short, extremely pretty woman with thick dark brown hair, wide-set gray eyes, and a look of obstinacy. “Salaam,” she murmured to Hassan after Lorna FredasMarkos had introduced them.

“How do you do,” Hassan replied. Miriam gazed at him steadily until he averted his eyes.

“Hassan,” Lorna said, “I feel as though we might have been wasting your talents.” The gray-haired woman smiled. “You should have called your experience with mind-tour production to my attention earlier.”

“It was noted in my record,” he said.

“Well, of course, but one can so easily overlook such notations—” Lorna abruptly fell silent, as if realizing that she had just admitted that she had never bothered to study his record thoroughly, that she had given it no more than the cursory glance that was probably all the attention it deserved. “Anyway,” the older woman continued, “Administrator Pavel is quite pleased that two members of my team are capable of putting together a new mind-tour. You will have access to all the records our sensors have made, and to everything in the official records of the Project, but if there’s anything else you need, be sure to let me know.”

“How long do we have?” Miriam asked.

Lorna lifted her brows. “Excuse me?”

“What’s the deadline?” Miriam said. “How long do we have to pull this thing together?”

“Administrator Pavel indicated that he would like to have it completed before the New Year’s celebrations,” the older woman replied.

“So we’ve got five months,” Miriam said. “Then I think we’ll see in the year 535 with one hell of a fine mind-tour.”

Lorna pursed her thin lips, as if tasting something sour. “You may both have more time if you need it. The Administrator would prefer that you keep to his informal deadline, but he also made it clear that he would rather have a mind-tour that is both aesthetically pleasing and inspirational, even if that takes longer to complete.”

Hassan bowed slightly in Lorna’s direction. “We’ll do our best to produce a mind-tour that is both pleasing and on time, God willing.”

“And that isn’t a sloppy rush job, either,” Miriam said.

“I may have to drag you away to our team meetings and your other standard tasks occasionally,” Lorna said, “but I’ll try to keep such distractions to a minimum.” She turned toward the doorway. “Salaam aleikum.”

“Aleikum salaam,” Miriam said. Her Arabic sounded as flat and unmusical as her Anglaic.

“God go with you,” Hassan added as the door slid shut behind their supervisor.

“Well, Hassan.” Miriam sat down on one of the cushions at the low table. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of the mind-tours I worked on. Most of them were for small children, so you probably haven’t. ‘Hans Among the Redwoods’—that was one of our more popular ones, and ‘Dinosaurs in the Gobi.’”

He tensed with surprise. “I saw that dinosaur mind-tour— marvelous work. Maybe you made it for children, but I have several adult friends who also enjoyed it.”

“And ‘The Adventure of Montrose Scarp.’”

Hassan was impressed in spite of himself. “‘Montrose Scarp?’” he asked as he seated himself. “My nephew Salim couldn’t get enough of that one. He just about forced me to put on a band and view it. What I particularly admired was the way the excitement of the climb and the geological history of the scarp were so seamlessly combined.”

“That was my doing, if I do say so myself.” Miriam pointed her chin at him. “Joe Kinnear—he was the director I worked with—he wanted to put in more of the usual shit—you know, stuff like having the mind-tourist lose his grip and fall before being caught by the rope tied around him, or throwing in a big storm just as you reach the top of the escarpment. He thought doing what I wanted would just slow the thing down, but I convinced him otherwise, and I was right.”

“Yes, you were,” Hassan said.

“And every damned mind-tour of Venus has the obligatory scene of Karim al-Anwar speaking to the Council of Mukhtars, telling them that what they learn from the terraforming of Venus might eventually be needed to save Earth from the effects of global warming, or else a scene of New York or some other flooded coastal city at evening while Venus gleams on the horizon and a portentous voice quotes from that speech Mukhtar Karim supposedly made toward the end of his life.”

Karim al-Anwar had been the first to propose a project to terraform Venus, back in the earliest days of Earth’s Nomarchies, not long after the Resource Wars almost six centuries ago. “When I gaze upon Venus,” Hassan quoted, “and view the images our probes have carried back to us from its hot and barren surface, I see Earth’s future, and fear for our world.”

“Followed by the sensation of heat and a hellish image of the Venusian surface,” Miriam said. “And the three most recent ones all have scenes of explosions on the Bats, which I frankly think is misleading and maybe even too frightening.”

The Bats, the two winged satellites in geosynchronous orbit at Venus’s poles, serviced the automatic shuttles that carried compressed oxygen from the robot-controlled installations at the Venusian poles to the Bats. The process of terraforming was releasing too much of Venus’s oxygen, and the excess had to be removed if the planet was ever to support life. The workers on the Bats, people who serviced the shuttles and maintained the docks, knew that the volatile oxygen could explode, and many lives had been lost in past explosions.

“There are real dangers on the Bats,” Miriam continued, “but we don’t have to dwell on them just for the sake of a few thrills. I’d rather avoid those kinds of clichés.”

“So would I,” Hassan said fervently.

“We should purge our minds of anything we’ve seen before and start over with an entirely fresh presentation.”

“I think that’s exactly what Pavel Gvishiani wants us to do.”

“We’re geologists,” Miriam said, “and maybe that’s the angle we ought to use. I don’t think past mind-tours have really given people a feeling for the Project in the context of geological time. I’d like to emphasize that. Hundreds of years of human effort set against the eons it took to form Venus—and if we get into planetary evolution and the beginnings of the solar system …”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Hassan said.

“Most of the people who experience this mind-tour are likely to be ignorant and unschooled, but that doesn’t mean we have to oversimplify things and lard the narrative with dramatic confrontations and action scenes.”

“It sounds as though what we want is a mind-tour that would be both enlightening to the uneducated,” Hassan said, “and yet entertaining and inspirational to the learned.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Miriam said.

It was also, Hassan thought, exactly what Pavel Gvishiani was likely to want. Judging by what Muhammad had told him about the Administrator, Pavel was not someone who cared to have his intelligence insulted. To have a mind-tour that would not just be an informative entertainment, but a masterpiece—

“We should talk about how we want to frame it,” Hassan said, “before we start digging through all the records and sensor scans. Have a structure that encapsulates our vision, and then start collecting what we need to realize it.”

“Exactly,” Miriam said. “You’d be surprised at how many mind-tour directors do it the other way around, looking at everything that could possibly have anything to do with their theme while hoping that some coherent vision suddenly emerges out of all the clutter. That isn’t the way I like to work.”

“Nor I,” Hassan said, gazing across the table at her expressive face and intense gaze, already enthralled.

Miriam, despite being a geologist and a specialist, lived in a building inhabited by workers, people who repaired homeostats and robots, maintained airships and shuttles, tended hydro- ponic gardens, looked out for small children in the Island’s child care center, and performed other necessary tasks. Hassan had assumed that there was no room for her elsewhere, and that her quarters would be temporary. Instead, Miriam had admitted to him that she had requested space there, and intended to stay.

“Look,” she said, “I went to a university, but a lot of students there didn’t let me forget where I came from. I feel more comfortable with workers than with the children of merchants and engineers and Counselors and Linkers.” She had glanced at him apologetically after saying that, obviously not wanting to hurt his feelings, but he had understood. His family’s position might have brought him to this place, but with Miriam, he now had a chance to make his own small mark on the Project, to inspire others with the dream of Venus.

“The Dream of Venus”—that was how he and Miriam referred to the mind-tour they had been outlining and roughing out for almost a month now. He thought of what they had been sketching and planning as he walked toward the star-shaped steel-blue building in which Miriam lived. As they usually did at last light, workers had gathered on the expanse of grass in front of the building. Families sat on the grass, eating from small bowls with chopsticks or fingers; other people were talking with friends, mending worn garments, or watching with pride and wonderment as their children reviewed their lessons on pocket screens. All children were schooled here, unlike Earth, where education was rationed and carefully parceled out.

It came to him then how much he now looked forward to coming here, to meeting and working with Miriam.

Hassan made his way to the entrance. Inside the windowless building, people had propped open the doors to their rooms to sit in the corridors and gossip; he passed one group of men gambling with sticks and dice. The place was as noisy and chaotic as a souk in Jeddah, but Hassan had grown more used to the cacophony. Since most of the workers could not read, the doors to their rooms were adorned with holo images or carvings of their faces, so that visitors could locate their quarters. Miriam’s room was near the end of this wing; a holo image of her face stared out at him from the door.

He pressed his palm against the door; after a few seconds, it opened. Miriam, wearing a brown tunic and baggy brown pants, was sitting on the floor in front of her wall screen, a thin metal band around her head; even in such plain clothes, she looked beautiful to him.

“Salaam,” she said without looking up.

“Salaam.”

“We’re making real progress,” she said. “This mind-tour is really shaping up.”

He sat down next to her. Unlike most of the people in this building, Miriam had a room to herself, but it was not much larger than a closet. Building more residences on the Islands would have meant cutting back on the gardens and parks that were deemed essential to maintaining the mental health of the Islanders.

“Before you show me any of your rough cut,” he said, “would you care to have supper with me as my guest?” This was the first time he had offered such an invitation to her; he had enough credit to order imported delicacies from Earth for her if that was what she wanted. “We can go to the garden near the Administrators’ building, unless of course you’d rather dine somewhere else.”

“Maybe later,” she said in the flat voice that was such a contrast to her lovely face and graceful movements. “I want you to look at this first.”

They had decided to depart from tradition in their structure for “The Dream of Venus.” Miriam also wanted to dispense with the usual chronological depictions, which she found stodgy, and Hassan had readily agreed.

The mind-tour would begin with Karim al-Anwar, as every other depiction of the Venus Project did, but instead of the usual dramatic confrontations with doubters and passionate speeches about Earth’s sister planet becoming a new home for humankind, they would move directly to what Karim had envisioned—Venus as it would be in the far future. The viewer would see the blue-green gem of a transformed Venus from afar and then be swept toward the terraformed planet, falling until the surface was visible through Venus’s veil of white clouds. Flying low over the shallow blue ocean, the mind-tourist would be swept past a small island chain toward the northern continent of Ishtar, with its high plateau and mountain massif that dwarfed even the Himalayas, to view a region of vast grasslands, evergreen forests, and rugged mountain peaks. Then the wail of the wind would rise as the viewer was carried south toward the equator and the colorful tropical landscape of the continent of Aphrodite.