The Mountain Cage (48 page)

Hassan was still tinkering with the sound effects for that section, but had found a piece of music that evoked the sound of a strong wind, and planned to use recordings of the powerful winds that continuously swept around Venus below the Islands as background and undertones. Near the end of the sequence, the viewer would fly toward a Venusian dawn, gazing at the sun before a dark shape, part of what remained of the Parasol, eclipsed its light. There were a few scientists who doubted that any part of the Parasol would be needed later on to insulate Venus from the heat and radiation that could again produce a runaway greenhouse effect, but most Cytherian specialists disagreed with them, and Hassan and Miriam had decided to go along with the majority’s opinion in their depiction.

At this point, the viewer was to be swept back in time, so to speak, to one of the Cytherian Islands, in a manner that would suggest what was not shown in the mind-tour—namely that in the distant future, when Venus was green with life, the Islands would slowly drop toward the surface, where their inhabitants would at last leave their domed gardens to dwell on their new world. Hassan and Miriam had inserted a passage during the earlier flight sequence in which the viewer passed over an expanse of parklike land that strongly resembled Island Two’s gardens and groves of trees. That scene, with some enhancement, would resonate in the viewer’s mind with the subsequent Island sequences.

“What have you got to show me?” Hassan asked.

Miriam handed him a band. “This is some stuff for the earlier sequences,” she said.

Hassan put the band around his head, was momentarily blind and deaf, and then was suddenly soaring over the vast canyon of the Diana Chasma toward the rift-ridden dome of Ada Regio in the east and the shield volcano of Maat Mons, the largest volcano on Venus, three hundred kilometers in diameter and rising to a Himalayan height. The scene abruptly shifted to the steep massif of Maxwell Montes rising swiftly from the hot dark surface of Ishtar Terra as millions of years were compressed into seconds. He whirled away from the impressively high mountain massif and hovered over a vast basaltic plain, watching as part of the surface formed a dome, spread out, grew flat, and then sank, leaving one of the round circular uniquely Venusian features called coronae. He moved over the cracked and wrinkled plateaus called tesserae and was surprised at the beauty he glimpsed in the deformed rocky folds of the land.

His field of vision abruptly went dark.

“What do you think?” Miriam’s voice asked.

He shifted his band slightly; Miriam’s room reappeared. “I know it’s rough,” she continued, “and I’ve got more to add to it, but I hope it gives you an idea. As for sound effects and the sensory stuff, I think we should keep that to a minimum—just a low undertone, the bare suggestion of a low throbbing noise, and maybe a feeling of extreme heat without actually making the viewer break out in a sweat. Well, what do you think?”

Hassan said, “I think it’s beautiful, Miriam.” His words were sincere. Somehow she had taken what could have been no more than a impressive visual panorama and had found the beauty in the strange, alien terrain of Venus as it might have been six hundred million years ago. It was as if she had fallen in love with that world, almost as if she regretted its loss.

“If you think that’s something,” she said, “wait until you see what I’ve worked up for the resurfacing section, where we see volcanoes flooding the plains with molten basalt. But I want your ideas on what to use for sensory effects there, and you’ll probably want to add some visuals, too—it seems a little too abbreviated as it is.”

“You almost make me sorry,” Hassan said, “that we’re changing Venus, that what it was will forever be lost—already is lost.”

Her gray eyes widened. “That’s exactly the feeling I was trying for. Every mind-tour about Venus and the Project always tries for the same effect—the feeling of triumph in the end by bringing a dead world to life, the beauty of the new Earthlike world we’re making, the belief that we’re carrying out God’s will by transforming Venus into what it might have become. I want the mind-tourist at least to glimpse what we’re losing with all this planetary engineering, to feel some sorrow that it is being lost.”

Hassan smiled. “A little of that goes a long way, don’t you think? We’re supposed to be glorifying the Project, not regretting it.”

“Sometimes I do regret it just a little. Imagine what we might have learned if we had built the Islands and simply used them to observe this planet. There are questions we may never answer now because of what we’ve already changed. Did Venus once have oceans that boiled away? Seems likely, but we probably won’t ever be sure. Was there ever a form of life here that was able to make use of ultraviolet light? We’ll never know that, either. We decided that terraforming this world and giving all of humankind that dream and learning what we could from the work of the Project outweighed all of that.”

“Be careful, Miriam.” Hassan lifted a hand. “We don’t want to question the very basis of the Project.”

“No, of course not.” But she sounded unhappy about making that admission. Hassan would never have insulted her by saying this aloud, but she sounded almost like a Habber, one of those whose ancestors had abandoned Earth long ago in the wake of the Resource Wars to live in the hollowed-out asteroids and artificial worlds called Habitats. There might be a few Habbers living here to observe the Project, but they thought of space as their home, not planetary surfaces. A Habber might have claimed that Venus should have been left as it had been.

“You’ve done wonderfully with your roughs,” Hassan murmured, suddenly wanting to cheer her. Miriam’s face brightened as she glanced toward him. “Really, if the final mind-tour maintains the quality of this work, we’ll have a triumph.” He reached for her hand and held it for a moment, surprised at how small and delicate it felt in his grip. “Let me take you to supper,” he went on, and admitted to himself at last that he was falling in love with her.

They would have a masterpiece, Hassan told himself. Three months of working with Miriam had freed something inside him, had liberated a gift that he had not known he possessed. He felt inspired whenever he was with her. In his private moments, as he reviewed sections of “The Dream of Venus,” he grew even more convinced that their mind-tour had the potential for greatness.

There, in one of the segments devoted to the Venus of millions of years ago, was a vast dark plain, an ocean of basalt covered by slender sinuous channels thousands of kilometers long. A viewer would soar over shield volcanoes, some with ridges that looked like thin spider legs, others with lava flows that blossomed along their slopes. The mind-tourist could roam on the plateau of Ishtar and look up at the towering peaks of the Maxwell Mountains, shining brightly with a plating of tellurium and pyrite. What might have been only a succession of fascinating but ultimately meaningless geological panoramas had been shaped by Miriam into a moving evocation of a planet’s life, a depiction of a truly alien beauty.

Hassan had contributed his own stylings to the mind-tour; he had shaped and edited many of the scenes, and his sensory effects had added greatly to the moods of awe and wonder that the mind-tour would evoke. It had been his idea to frame the entire mind-tour as the vision of Karim al-Anwar, and to begin and end with what the great man might have dreamed, a device that also allowed them to leave out much of the tedious expository material that had cluttered up so many mind-tours depicting Venus and the Project. But Miriam was the spirit that had animated him, that had awakened him to the visions and sounds that had lain dormant inside him.

The fulfillment he felt in the work they were doing together was marred by only one nagging worry: that “The Dream of Venus” was in danger of becoming an ode to Venus past, a song of regret for the loss of the world that most saw as sterile and dead, but which had become so beautiful in Miriam’s renderings. What the Administrators wanted was a glorification of the Project, a mind-tour that would end on a note of optimism and triumph. They were unlikely to accept “The Dream of Venus” as it was, without revisions, and might even see it as vaguely subversive.

But there was still time, Hassan told himself, to reshape the mind-tour when “The Dream of Venus” was nearly in final form. He did not want to cloud Miriam’s vision in the meantime with doubts and warnings; he did not want to lose what he had discovered in himself.

He and Miriam were now eating nearly all of their meals together and conducting their courtship at night, in her bed or his own. He had admitted his love for her, as she had confessed hers for him, and soon the other members of their geological team and the residents of their buildings were asking them both when they intended to make a pledge. Hassan’s mother was the cousin of a Mukhtar, and his father had always hoped that Hassan would also take an influential woman as a bondmate, but Pyotr could not justifiably object to Miriam, who had won her place with intelligence and hard work. In any event, by the time he finally told his father that he loved Miriam enough to join his life to hers, their mind-tour would have secured their status here. Pyotr could take pride in knowing that a grandchild of his would be born on the Islands, that his descendants might one day be among those who would live on Venus.

That was something else “The Dream of Venus” had roused inside Hassan. He had come here thinking only of doing his best not to disgrace his family. Now the dream of Venus had begun to flower in him.

“We think that the Project has no true ethical dilemmas,” Miriam was saying, “that it can’t possibly be wrong to terraform a dead world. We’re not displacing any life forms, we’re not destroying another culture and replacing it with our own. But there is a kind of arrogance involved, don’t you think?”

Hassan and Miriam were sitting on a bench outside a greenhouse near Island Two’s primary school. They often came here after last light, when the children had left and the grounds adjoining the school were still and silent.

“Arrogance?” Hassan asked. “I suppose there is, in a way.” He had engaged in such discussions before, at university, and it had been natural for him and Miriam to talk about the issues the Project raised while working on “The Dream of Venus.” Lately, their conversations had taken on more intensity.

“God gave us nature to use, as long as we use it wisely and with concern for other life forms,” Miriam said, repeating the conventional view promulgated by both the true faith of Islam and the Council of Mukhtars. “Terraforming Venus is therefore justified, since the measure of value is determined by the needs of human beings. And if you want to strengthen that argument, you can throw in the fact that we’re bringing life to a world where no life existed, which has to be rated as a good. On top of that, there’s the possibility that Venus was once much like Earth before a runaway greenhouse effect did it in, so to speak. Therefore, we’re restoring the planet to what it might have been.”

Hassan, still holding her hand, was silent; the assertions were much too familiar for him to feel any need to respond. He was looking for an opening in which to bring up a subject he could no longer avoid. “The Dream of Venus” was close to completion, and there was little time for them to do the editing and make the revisions that were necessary if their mind-tour was to be approved for distribution by the Administrators and the Project Council. He did not want to think of how much credit he and Miriam might already have cost the Project. All of that credit, and more—perhaps much more—would be recovered by the mind-tour; he was confident of that. But he had broached the need for editing to Miriam only indirectly so far.

“You could argue that all of life, not just human life and what furthers its ends, has intrinsic value,” Miriam continued, “but that wouldn’t count against the Project, only against forcing Venus to be a replica of Earth even if it later shows signs of developing its own distinct ecology in ways that differ from Earth’s and which make it less habitable—or not habitable at all—by human beings. You could say that we should have abandoned our technology long ago and lived in accordance with nature, therefore never having the means to terraform a world, but that has always been an extremist view.”

“And unconstructive,” Hassan said. At this point, he thought, humankind would only do more damage to Earth by abandoning advanced technology; solar power satellites and orbiting industrial facilities had done much to lessen the environmental damage done to their home world.

“What I worry about now,” she said, “isn’t just what terraforming might do to Venus that we can’t foresee, but what it might do to us. Remaking a planet may only feed our arrogance. It could lead us to think we could do almost anything. It could keep us from asking questions we should be asking. We might begin to believe that we could remake anything— the entire solar system, even our sun, to serve our ends. We might destroy what we should be preserving, and end by destroying ourselves.”

“Or transforming ourselves,” Hassan interjected. “You haven’t made much of an argument, my love.”

“I’m saying that we should be cautious. I’m saying that, whatever we do, doubt should be part of the equation, not an arrogance that could become a destructive illusion of certainty.”

Those feelings, he knew, lay at the heart of their mind-tour. Uncertainty and doubt were the instruments through which finite beings had to explore their universe. The doubts, the knowledge that every gain meant some sort of loss—all of that underlined “The Dream of Venus” and lent their depiction its beauty.