The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 7

  Elizabeth tried to meet his eyes. He couldn’t be seriously angry. Without the scar, he looked much better.

  He put the fork down, the bite uneaten. “Are you ready for a visit to Laputa? You can check the facilities, and they would be honored if you came down.”

  “Laputa?” She relaxed in the remembering, not realizing until then that she’d been tense. After two hundred years, so much could have changed. When she let the doctor hook her to the complicated devices, she had thought about unstable governments, about unplanned celestial events, about changes in corporate policy. Who could guarantee that she’d wake up in the world she’d designed? This was the great leap of faith she’d made when she started the project. The plan for her to see it to the end would be to outlive everyone around her, and the way to do that was to be the test subject for the long sleep. Henry, for obvious reasons, accompanied her. “You really named the workstation that?”

  “A city now. Much more than a station. The name was in your notes. I don’t think Jonathan Swift imagined it this way, though.” He pushed his plate away. “It’s quite a bit bigger than the initial designs. The more functions we built in, the more cubic feet of air we needed to keep from sinking into the hotter regions of the atmosphere. It’s the largest completely man-made structure in the solar system. Tourist traffic alone makes it profitable.”

  The trip from the carousel to Laputa took a little more than an hour under constant acceleration or deceleration except for a stomach lurching moment midway when the craft turned. Out the porthole beside her seat, she could see Venus’s changed face. Where the sun hit, it was much darker, but the sun itself was darker too, fuzzy and red, partly blocked by the dust umbrella protecting the planet from the heat, cooling it from its initial 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Henry offered a glass of wine. She sipped it, enjoying its crisp edge. Wine swirled in the bottom of the glass. She sipped again, held the taste in her mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. “I don’t recognize this.”

  He sat across from her. The wine bottle rested in a secure holder in the table’s center. “It’s an eighty-year-old Chateau Laputa. One of the original bottles of Venusian aperitif. Bit of a gamble. Some of this vintage didn’t age well, but it turns out being thirty percent closer to the sun makes for excellent grapes. They grew them in soil from the surface, heavily treated, of course.” The ferry shuddered. “Upper edges of the atmosphere. We’ll be there soon.”

  Through the porthole, Laputa appeared first as a bright red glimmer on Venus’s broad horizon, and as they grew closer, revealing details. Elizabeth realized the glow was the sun’s reflected light. And then she saw Laputa truly was huge; it felt like flying low over the San Gabriels into the Los Angeles basin, when the city opened beneath her. But Laputa dwarfed that. They continued to travel, bumping hard through turbulence until the floating city’s boundaries disappeared to the left and right, and then they were over the structure, their shadow racing across the mirrored surface.

  Inside she toured the engineering facilities where they built floating atmosphere converters to work on the carbon dioxide gasses that trapped so much heat. She met dozens of project managers and spoke briefly to a room full of chief technicians. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t act like the groups of upper management she was used to working with. There was no jockeying for position, none of the push and pull of internal politics that made corporate board rooms so interestingly tense. None of the high stakes adrenaline she was so used to. They listened. They took notes. They answered her questions, but they were quiet, attentive. Worshipful, almost.

  Henry drove her in a compact electric cart to the physics labs that controlled the steady rain of Kuiper Belt objects bringing water to the planet, even though it still boiled into vapor on the scalding surface. In a large presentation room, dominated by a map of the solar system alive with lights, each representing a ship or a station, the chief geologist finished his speech. A long line of dots representing asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects in transit traced a curved path through the system ending at Venus. “Fifteen years from now, liquid water will exist at the poles. We should have northern and southern hemisphere lakes by the time you inspect again, perhaps the beginning of an ocean if the weather patterns develop according to the models.” He bowed when he finished and kept his eyes lowered.

  Everywhere they went, and everyone they talked to treated her with the same deference. Only Henry would meet her gaze. “You are the Elizabeth Audrey,” he said again when she complained. “Maker of worlds. Come with me. I think you’ll enjoy this. We have transport waiting.”

  They walked out of a physics lab, leaving behind obsequious scientists and engineers. Henry led, and Elizabeth noticed as she had before that he was a short man. If he were only six or seven inches taller, he might earn more respect. Their next sleep was scheduled for four hundred years. If she talked to the doctors, they could do the work and Henry would not need to be bothered with the decision himself. After all, if he was going to be her sole representative in the future where no one knew her except as the ultimate absentee boss, then he should look the part.

  “This is it,” he said as the car sped from between two buildings. He stopped and sat beside her while she took it in. A wall of structures a mile away loomed over a plain, a part of the huge circle that enclosed the space. High overhead, Laputa’s roof arced to the far horizons. The sun glowed sullenly, a red bright spot in the dark sky. Away from the city’s artificial light, red tinted her arms, the metal edges on the car, Henry’s face. She turned her hands over. Even her palms took on a red shade.

  “What is this place?”

  “Blister Park. Come on.”

  As soon as they stepped out of the car, Elizabeth saw. The floor was clear. Beneath their feet swirled the clouds of Venus, almost black in Laputa’s shadow, but far away the city stopped and sunlight came down, illuminating a smoky show of reds and oranges and browns. They moved farther from the car, away from the building, and soon the illusion that they were walking on air seemed almost complete.

  Below, in the shadow, bright red and yellow lights twinkled.

  “Volcanoes,” said Henry. “Venus was volcanically active before, but our asteroid and comet bombardment to spin the planet provoked eruptions. The atmospheric technicians tell me this is good, though. They use the new chemicals in the air to catalyze out what they don’t want and to create what they do. There will be a breathable atmosphere before they are done.”

  “Keeping in mind the improvements in technology, how long until I can walk on the ground unprotected?”

  “Still another thousand years or so. If we engineer ourselves instead, it would be much quicker. We need heat tolerance, and a system that uses less oxygen.”

  “For the workers, yes. The ones that prepare the way, but Venus will not be complete until it is the planet that Earth should have been.” She could picture it, a surface rich with forests, and an ecosystem in balance, humanity appropriately humble in the face of a world done right.

  “But this has a beauty of its own.” Henry moved beside her. The light from below cast shadows on his face.

  “It was ugly when we started, Henry. Almost no rotation. Hundreds of degrees too hot. Too much carbon dioxide. Pressure at the surface equivalent to being a kilometer underwater. No life. Nothing. The least attractive spot in the solar system, and it’s still ugly now. It will be beautiful, though, when I’m done. When I’ve reshaped it.”

  Elizabeth walked toward the middle of Blister Park. She held her hands away from her sides, palms down, like a tightrope walker. If she didn’t look up, all she saw beyond her feet were clouds and the volcanoes’ dim pulsing. Surprisingly, she felt no vertigo. She moved on the invisible surface as if she’d been born to it. “I’m a god,” she said.

  In a four hundred year long dream, knowing she was dreaming, Elizabeth ran down a long hill with her brother. She hadn’t known her brother. He died at childbirth, one of the thousands who didn’t make it through the stil
l birth plagues where children were so warped in gestation they couldn’t draw breath on their own. It became simpler and more merciful to let them die, death after death. Science took just a few years to find the cause of the plague that killed her brother, the first of the toxic-Earth plagues, but it was too late for him.

  In the dream, though, he ran beside her toward the stream that flowed through cool grasses. At the edge, they stopped. No frogs today. No crawdads hiding under rocks. She didn’t know why she’d expected frogs and crawdads; they were never in the dream, never, but still the same disappointment washed through her. A boggy flat stretched from both sides, and the reeds that poked up through the smelly muck were brown and broken. A mass of cardboard stuck out of the water, covered with a noxious-looking slime.

  Elizabeth held her brother’s hand as they walked downstream, careful to keep their feet dry. Around the corner the stream ducked under a fence and into a park. They pushed open a gate. Here, closely clipped lawn painted the hill to a cement curb lining the stream, which now flowed through an open culvert. Signs warned them to stay out of the water, but her brother lay on his chest, reaching down to touch the ripples. In the dream, Elizabeth tried to shout, but her throat constricted. His fingers brushed the water, and then he turned to look at her, his eyes serious and dark (where had she seen those eyes before?). A scar marked the side of his face. She wanted to rub it away, but when she dropped to her knees to touch him, his skin had grown cold, like a statue. And then he was a statue, a bronze of a boy lying on his side by a stream, his clothes a solid metal, a patina of corrosion in the places that were not buffed smooth.

  Elizabeth sat beside him, beside the contained stream. In the sky, no clouds, but a dozen contrails crisscrossed each other, like a giant tic tac toe game. The air smelled of city and too many people piled on one another, story on story in high rises beyond the park. A clatter of metal against metal clanged in the distance. More construction. On the stream’s other side, flowers in unnaturally neat rows filled a garden held behind a plastic border. She looked back beyond the fence where trash filled the water. Neither was right. She knew neither was right, but it was too late to shout. Her brother was dead, and she had no breath behind her scream. The statue couldn’t hold her hand.

  Elizabeth couldn’t breathe. She choked and then coughed, an unproductive spasm that didn’t give her a chance to inhale before she coughed again. Her chest hurt. People bustled around her, but she hadn’t opened her eyes yet. She was suffocating. Someone held her hand. A mask went over her face, and pressure built up within it, pushing against her eyeballs.

  “Relax, Eliza. Let the machine help you.”

  She opened her mouth, allowing the pressure’s force to open her throat, filling her lungs. The air tasted sweet! She could feel tears pooling where the mask wrapped her cheeks. The pressure relented and she exhaled on her own before it built again, respirating her at its own pace.

  She took slow breaths, each one quivering on the trigger of another spasm, but breath by breath the urge to cough subsided until her lungs moved easily. “I don’t need this,” she tried to say, but the mask muffled her. She tapped the hard surface with her finger. The mask came off. She was in the awakening room. A doctor stood to one side, the mask clasped, ready to put it back if her breathing struggled. Beside him, a technician bent over what looked like a small clipboard. When he turned, she saw information flashing across the surface. Her information, she assumed. Henry sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand.

  For a minute she inhaled and exhaled carefully, testing each movement. Then she looked at him. “Did you call me Eliza?” Her voice cracked and felt dry in her throat.

  He let go of her hand. “Sorry. Emotional moment.”

  “Don’t let it happen again.” She shut her eyes. “Where are we?”

  “Laputa, but we’ve anchored. The floating city’s era has passed. Not enough pressure in the atmosphere.”

  Later, Elizabeth and Henry walked a hallway in the infirmary. Her steps were unsteady. When they turned a corner, she almost fell. Henry grabbed her arm to hold her upright. They had dressed her in a white robe with stiff, exaggerated collar and cuffs. Change of fashion she guessed.

  “It was harder this time.”

  “We’re into new territory in long sleep. Others have been packed, but it’s just until cures for their diseases are found or they outlive their enemies or they want a one-way trip to the future. If they’ve got the money, they can buy the bed. The arc ships heading to the Zeta Reticula system use long sleep too. It’s a 4,000 year trip, but they’re waking up every one-hundred years for equipment maintenance. Only you and I have slept so long uninterrupted.”

  Elizabeth shook her head, trying to clear the fuzziness. “Am I damaged?” She took longer steps as if she could force strength upon herself.

  “I hope not, or I’m damaged too. They’re still testing me, and I’ve been up for six years. I told them I was okay after a week.” They turned another corner in the hall. Henry held her arm again, making Elizabeth feel like an old woman, which she was, now that she thought about it. “We’re walking to an auditorium now. There will be a ceremony. The people want to see you.”

  “Public relations never goes away.”

  Henry looked diplomatic. The extra years he had been awake gave his face more character than Elizabeth remembered. A map of tiny wrinkles sprung from the corners of his dark eyes. “Well, the situation’s a bit more complicated than that. We should have foreseen.”

  Elizabeth moved steadily forward, already more confident, eager to see how much closer they were to her goal. “Complicated how?”

  “Lots of changes. Governments have risen and fallen. Politics went through several evolutions. The business environment metamorphed during the time.”

  “They didn’t nationalize me, did they?” Elizabeth stopped. The idea that she might have lost control frightened her. Her stomach knotted. The companies, the investments, the foreboding weight of her multi-industrial empire might have fled her grasp in the years she slept. Anything could have happened while she slumbered. “They haven’t taken my assets?”

  Henry gazed down at her solemnly. Elizabeth realized the doctors had done their work. He was now at least two or three inches taller than she. His hair matched his eyes, still black. Some gray there would give him more distinction. She made a note to herself to order the change for him, maybe a deeper timbre to his voice to give him authority.

  “We should have known that a corporation couldn’t last for hundreds of years, Elizabeth. Even a dozen decades would be asking for a lot, but your CEOs, multiple generations of them, made decisions to preserve your initiative. We’re still on schedule.”

  “I can talk to heads of state. Solidify our position.” She pictured the crowded board rooms, the private conversations over expensive dinners at exclusive restaurants, the phone calls and e-mails, all with her at the center, pulling threads, massaging egos, handing down favors with imperial aplomb.

  “You won’t need to.” He led her to a set of double doors. Inside, two lines of exquisitely dressed men and women gave them a hallway to walk through. Many of the people bowed as Elizabeth and Henry passed. Elizabeth still didn’t feel completely focused. A surreal air hovered about the scene. “Madam Audrey,” one man said as he touched the back of his hand to his forehead and bent at the waist. No one else spoke. At the hallway’s end, an ornate set of doors that reached to the high ceiling swung open. Elizabeth slowed. She couldn’t see the other side of the dark room beyond, but it seemed huge, and there was movement in the dark. Lights flooded a stage that she and Henry stepped onto. She shaded her eyes, and the roar began, hundreds of thousands of voices, cheering, cheering, cheering, and they were cheering for her.

  Henry leaned in, cupped his hand around her ear. “They arranged for you to become a religion. It’s the only organization that would last long enough to see it to the end.”

  The next morning, Elizabeth joined Henry in a vehicle ga
rage where a heavily insulated truck waited for them. “First,” said Henry, “I want to point out that we are going to exit through those doors and into a Venus morning. Thirteen hours from now, the sun will set. Your original plan was for a twenty-four hour day/night cycle, but after four-hundred years of asteroid and comet bombardment, the terraformers saw that we were getting diminishing returns. At some point, each collision produced more problems for them to undo than they were solving, so they decided to stop and leave Venus with a longer day.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “I don’t like compromise.” She did feel steadier on her feet than she had yesterday, and climbed into the car before Henry could give her assistance. “What’s second?”

  “Best I show you.” He pulled the truck into an airlock. When the outside doors opened, a red, dusty light flooded the bay. Elizabeth slid close to the window. A graded road led into a series of low hills that faded in the hazy red air. The car pulled out of the garage, and for the first time, Elizabeth could see first hand what her efforts had produced. A brisk breeze whipped dust off the road ahead of them.

  “Still warm, still too much carbon dioxide, still too much surface pressure, but we’re very close, Elizabeth.” The truck climbed the first hill, and from the top, as far as the dusty air allowed, similar hills reached all around. “The final changes go the slowest.”

  In front of them, the morning sun glared red and unbelievably large. The truck lurched through a turn as it ascended a second hill.

  “I thought there would be more evidence of the meteor strikes.”

  Henry laughed. “Oh, heavens, there is, but it’s all on the equator. We have created a badlands like nothing this solar system has ever seen. Some of the strikes broke the tectonic plates, bringing up rock from thousands of feet below the surface, liquefying, vaporizing, shattering. Venus’ equator regions are already legendary. Anything could get lost there or hide there. It truly is untamable. See this?” He held out his wrist. A shiny black bracelet set with green and yellow stones caught the sun light. “The metal is carbon nanotubes. If you need it made out of carbon, Venus can make it. Every spaceship hull in the solar system is manufactured here. The jewels were mined in the badlands. Ah, we’re here.”