CHAPTER THREE
Exiled from his own hotel room until Zoya decided to go someplace else, Sabbath was reduced to riding around Ishtar in a bubble for an hour. Two thirds of that time was taken up by a nap, and then Sabbath sat staring at nothing while his comm implant searched Ishtar’s infospace. Finally he spoke to the bubble. “Take me to Vidnagory level 40 East, Avanturny Tupik.”
As the bubble shunted from the local tube to a high-speed route across Ishtar, I looked up all the residents and businesses on that street to see what might have attracted Sabbath’s interest. Avanturny Tupik was only half a kilometer long, in a medium-density section of the rather unfashionable Vidnagory arcology. However, a dozen residents there were either mountain guides, ran climbing schools, or designed specialty mountaineering equipment.
“You’re going to climb Maxwell Montes?”
“Just as Ponardo did.”
“Ponardo died trying.”
“That’s what I have been told.”
“What makes you think you’ll do any better?”
“I don’t. But this is the obvious next step so I’m taking it.” The combination of his designed-in unreadability and an almost unfathomably cynical personality meant it was impossible to tell when Sabbath was kidding. So I let the matter drop and rode in silence until the bubble deposited us at Avanturny Tupik.
When the Vidnagory arcology was built, the east side of the structure had an unobstructed view of the Maxwell range, and Avanturny Tupik ended at a big window which would have framed the highest peak perfectly. Unfortunately, about a century later the tall cone of the Koroleva Palatz arcology blocked it off. A projection of the original vista floated in the air in front of the big window now.
Fifty meters down the street from the bubble terminal Sabbath stopped in front of a building bearing the virtual tag “Feliks Sonogong Climbing Academy and Mountain Expeditions. Reach New Heights!” The door opened for Sabbath as he approached, and we followed a narrow passage to the back of the building where a chimp in a spiffy-looking climbing suit waited, lightly patting his palms together.
“Mr. Samedi! Got your offer! Very generous!” said Sonogong, and seized Sabbath in a sudden embrace.
“Good to meet you,” said Sabbath. “I’m sorry about the short notice.”
“Fine, fine!” The chimp stepped back and stood with a knuckle helping as he regarded his customer. “Check out first. See how you climb. Experience?”
“I’ve been up the east face of Yerupajá and the west face of Thor on Earth, and on Mars I’ve done the Echus Chasma vertical and Aeolus Mons.”
I filed those details away to see if I could place any of Sabbath’s aliases at those places. There wouldn’t be too many names to sort through, given that he was claiming some of the toughest climbs on two worlds.
Sonogong’s head tilted to one side slightly, as if he wasn’t entirely sure he believed Sabbath’s claim. “Tough climbs. Still—check out anyway.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Sabbath.
Sonogong led us into the school itself, a ten-meter-square room that extended up the entire twenty-meter height of the arcology level. The walls were smart matter, and at a gesture from the chimp they shaped themselves into steep rocky cliffs.
“Up! Nothing sticky,” said Sonogong.
Sabbath’s suit obediently retracted back to his elbows and knees, and he accepted the loan of a pair of dumb gloves and socks from Sonogong. Then he surveyed the faces for a moment before picking a spot and starting his climb.
Of course, he did it well. He picked a good course, avoiding an obvious easy route which dead-ended fifteen meters up. He climbed steadily and efficiently and showed proper caution, moving only one hand or foot at a time, not hurrying but never quite stopping.
The chimp watched impassively, his hands faintly mirroring Sabbath’s movements. When his pupil reached the top and tapped the ceiling, Sonogong drummed the floor loudly in approval. “Wait!” He gestured and the lower fifteen meters of the simulated cliff face shifted, becoming notably smoother and steeper. “Now down!”
Human anatomy being what it is, climbing down is often harder than going up, especially when you haven’t had the chance to study the surface in advance. Sabbath handled it fine, with careful movements, testing footholds before putting his weight on them, even though they were smart matter and not natural rock.
At one point he had to go down, sideways, up, over to the adjoining face, and then continue down, and he made it look as though he already knew the route. Even at the bottom, when he could have just jumped to the floor, he continued his steady and cautious descent until he was all the way down.
“Good, good!” said Sonogong, and drummed the floor again for emphasis. “Now Venus style. Suit closed!”
Sabbath’s suit covered him and began feeding him air. The walls shifted again, and I could see a layer of fog form as the surface rapidly chilled. When the climbing walls were coated with frost, Sonogong pointed up and Sabbath began his ascent.
Even with sticky gloves and feet, the frosty surface presented Sabbath with quite a challenge. He didn’t seem to notice, and climbed with the same steady pace as before—clearing away frost when necessary, making use of tiny cracks for a good grip, and following a wide zigzag up the cliff face.
“Why?” Sonogong called out when Sabbath was about halfway up.
“That’s the best route,” he replied.
“Why so soon? Why this week? Take more time. Get ready.”
Sabbath waited to reply until he navigated around a simulated outcrop. “I can’t stay longer, and I don’t want to miss the chance to go up Maxwell Montes.”
Sonogong waited until Sabbath was in a tricky situation trying to deal with three meters of absolutely smooth surface. “Big risk. Going so fast.”
“I’m being careful.”
“Risk for both of us. I get you up and down Maxwell safely. Harder if you aren’t ready.”
“I’m ready,” Sabbath called down as he found a hairline crack in the sheer cliff and wedged his fingertips into it to gain enough height for the next handhold.
“My call, not yours.”
Sabbath tapped the ceiling a second time, and once again Sonogong altered the cliff below him for the descent. It was pretty tough this time—a roughly ninety-five-degree reverse slope, so that there was nothing directly underneath Sabbath but air. The surface was still super-chilled and slick with frost.
He didn’t say anything, but his pace was definitely slower. A couple of times Sabbath had to do without footholds entirely, which meant he hung by the fingers of one hand while moving the other. On a real climb he’d have pitons and an axe, but Sonogong had thrown this at him when he had nothing but his own body and his suit. I found myself wondering if the suit was worried.
At one point when Sabbath dangled by his left hand, groping below his waist with his right for a handhold, Sonogong shouted up, “Most climbers plan ahead. Weeks or standard years.”
Sabbath didn’t answer until he had swung himself down and hung by both hands. “I traveled in hibernation so I didn’t have the chance.” He examined the smooth cliff below him and then glanced to his left. I could just make out a tiny ledge barely wider than his finger, a hundred and fifty-two centimeters left of his waist.
He reached for it but his arm wasn’t long enough, then tried to scoot his grip to the left, but still couldn’t reach. After a second’s hesitation Sabbath began swinging himself from side to side, building up momentum to get his outstretched fingers to the little ledge. Could he tell how much frost was on the surface? His hand might slide right off.
His swings got wider and wider and I realized there was no way he’d be able to reach his new grip before letting go of the old one. In Sonogong’s classroom he would fall nine meters to a smart matter floor ready to give him a safe landing. On the actual mountain the drop could be kilometers down to bare rock.
After four swings he had enough momentum and launched himself sideways. His left hand gripped the little ledge and I could see his fingers start to slip, but then he got his right hand on it as well, and he dragged his feet against the cliff face to bring his swaying to a stop.
Sonogong had been too fascinated by watching Sabbath to call out any distracting questions, but once that tense moment was past he remembered. “Picked out a route? Up the mountain?”
“Yes and no,” Sabbath replied. He moved down and sideways about twenty centimeters, then thirty centimeters straight down, which brought him to a point where the negative slope became a sheer vertical instead. “I had an—an acquaintance who made a partial ascent of the Maxwell range, but I’m not sure of his route.”
“Ask him.”
Sabbath managed the last six meters relatively easily, and stepped back onto the floor. “I’m afraid I can’t. He seems to have died.”
“Oh!” Sonogong’s fingers spread wide. “Ponardo San! I heard! First dead on Maxwell in five years. Your friend?”
“Colleague.”
The chimp cocked his head in puzzlement. “Funny business.”
“Which business do you mean?”
“You and him both. He went up solo, and fell. Not much info. Now you, all of a sudden. Funny.”
Sabbath appeared to think it over for a second, then smiled and spread his hands. “I don’t want to keep any secrets from you. I’m actually here to investigate Ponardo San’s death. His employers sent me. What else do you know?”
The chimp held his hands open, palms down. “A little. Rumors. No guide, minimal gear. Fell and died. Whole park shut down.”
“Who found him?”
“Security Bureau, not Rescue.”
“I haven’t seen anything about the exact location of the body.”
Sonogong shrugged, flipping his palms up. “The ground?”
“So—will you help me do the climb?”
Sonogong thought before answering, then held up two fingers. “Two conditions.”
“Name them.”
“Your offer—double it.”
“Done. Is that all?”
“No. You’re good, no question. But these mountains are bad. Worst climb anywhere. So you listen: first time you don’t do what I say, I’m going back down. No refund.”
“Agreed,” said Sabbath, and the two of them bowed to mark the deal.
I spent the next couple of hours in slow mode as Sonogong gave Sabbath a completely superfluous lecture about climbing equipment and how to use it. If Sabbath had done any of the climbs he had claimed—and though I never trusted him I didn’t think he was lying about that—he knew at least as much as Sonogong and possibly more.
They broke for dinner and this time Sabbath ate normal printed food. He and Sonogong shared a big bowl of fig and greens salad with crushed nuts and toasted grasshoppers. I interrogated the kitchen printer and found that Feliks Sonogong ate this same meal every two days, alternating with grilled chicken and mango. Not an adventurous eater, then.
When both of them were done Sonogong reconfigured the room. The floor shaped itself into a perfect 1:50,000 scale model of the northwest corner of the Maxwell range.
Maxwell Montes is the highest mountain range on Venus. It extends just over 800 kilometers, more or less north to south, and looms above the flat-topped Lakshmi plateau, dwarfing the giant arcology towers of Ishtar to the west. The slope of the mountains is fairly gradual on the east, but quite steep on the western face. Guess which side people like to climb. The highest peak of the range is Skadi, which tops out at eleven kilometers above mean datum—even during the big cool-off, Venus never had a “sea level” for anyone to measure.
Earth has a complicated system of tectonic plates sliding around the surface and bumping into each other, with mountains mostly forming along the plate boundaries. Mars’s surface stays put, so the mountains there are big volcanoes which stay parked over the same hot spot for billions of years, getting taller and taller.
Venus is kind of an intermediate case. Its crust is thicker than Earth’s, and lacks the hydrated minerals that let continents slide around at a breakneck fifty millimeters a year. Venus’s crust doesn’t move much, but it’s still a big planet with a hot core, and all that energy has to go somewhere.
Over the past hundred million years a magma plume under the Lakshmi plateau has pushed a big block of crust up, tipping it like a hatch opening, until the edge is seven to ten kilometers in the sky. The hot magma’s still down there, and some of Ishtar’s energy budget comes from deep thermal wells.
The Maxwell mountains are the highest land on Venus, and thus before the sunshade they were the coolest place—for an extremely loose definition of “cool.” Humans built their first permanent outposts on the eastern slopes, but those all got wiped out during the big wars of the Fourth Millennium. Since then the Maxwell range has been a preserve, a monument to the human desire to keep things around just because they’re old or look interesting.
“Two main routes up,” said the chimp, and pointed a finger at the model. A tiny green spot lit up where he pointed, at the base of the west face of the range about twenty kilometers south of the northern end. “Easiest is the South Chimney. Still hard, though.” The green spot moved across the model as he spoke. “Cross the scree and rocks to the base of the face, here. Then up.” He moved the green dot up the cliff. “This big wedge of rock is separated from the main face. Gap widens from zero at the bottom to eight meters at the top. Nine hundred meters up. Climb in the crevice—no wind, two surfaces for handholds.”
“Sounds doable,” said Sabbath.
“Easiest part. Above it, free-climb five hundred meters on an eighty-degree slope to this crevice.” The dot crossed a smooth rock surface to a sinister-looking crack. “Goes up a kilometer. From there, diagonal across the face two kilometers to the shoulder of Skadi, the highest peak. Ridge rises at only twenty-six degrees for a kilometer and a half to the summit. Biggest danger there is wind.”
“You mentioned another route.”
“North Angle. Lots harder. Climbing Association rates South Chimney an eight. North Angle is nine point seven.”
“How would you tackle that one?”
The little green spot moved to the corner of the ridge, where the steep west face met the shallower north face. “Start here. West face is a seventy-five-degree slope for the first kilometer, then only four degrees off vertical for the next four. North face is a sixty-eight-degree slope, completely unprotected from the winds out of the polar basin. Thirty to forty k.p.h., gusts over sixty. The dense atmosphere makes them four times stronger than on Earth or in a hab. No biological ever climbed north face.”
“Including Ponardo San, so we can eliminate that.”
“West face rises four kilometers, no breaks, until it meets the northwest face of Skadi here. From there to the top is a fifty-degree slope, with plenty of high winds. The entire route is bare rock with no shelter.”
“Where did Ponardo San fall?”
“Somewhere between the Chimney and the Angle. Exact spot confidential.” The green spot moved back and forth along the base of the west face. “First climb, probably tried Chimney.”
“Jirokaja does not understand,” I said. “If the winds blow from the north, how could Ponardo San’s body fall upwind?”
“It’s got a point,” said Sabbath. “Seems more likely that San was trying the North Angle and got blown off.”
Sonogong folded his fingers. “Bad idea.”
“Jirokaja also does not understand why Master wishes to follow San’s route. Master may suffer the same fate, which would be an undesirable outcome.”
“Bad idea,” Sonogong repeated.
“I’m not entirely untrained, as I mentioned,” said Sabbath.
“Maxwell range—especially Skadi—is the toughest climb there is,” said Sonogong. “No other place with solid ground has winds like Venus.”
“I’ve agreed to your price and your conditions. I have to do this,” said Sabbath. “What’s the soonest we can go up?”
The chimp scratched his ears in thought. “Big rush. Bad idea. Practice at least a week. I have scans of the worst parts. You can try them here first. What’s your mass?”
“Eighty.”
“Lose five. More if you can. You won’t have to carry it up six kilometers. I decide when you’re ready.”
“I’ll be ready in a week.”
“I decide,” said Sonogong, and folded his massive arms.
• • •
Sabbath spent the next four days doing intensive exercise and eating only what his biomedical implant asked for. He had set it for fat loss and muscle gain, and I think it may have tried to get a little revenge for how often he ignored its advice normally. Each day it let him have two liters of water, a liter of fruit juice, and a liter of protein broth. The implant grudgingly let him flavor the water with botanicals and the broth with mushrooms, but it drew the line at capsicum or pepper. Alcohol and caffeine were right out.
At first he installed himself in an exercise room at the Hotel Tanit for three hours every morning and again in the afternoon, doing resistance weights with each muscle group, alternating with half-hour dance routines. In the evenings he practiced climbing with Feliks Sonogong.
However, on the third afternoon, when he returned from his liquid lunch he found Zoya Dukra working her way through the weight sequence, dressed in a very impractical exercise outfit, consisting of a tiny thong bottom and a loose sleeveless top with a very low neck.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “I thought this room was for guests only.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” she said.
The floor shaped itself into a second exercise station and Sabbath began to work on his arm muscles.
Zoya endured the silence for twenty seconds. “Why didn’t you answer my messages?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“All this exercise must get boring. I should think you’d enjoy a little conversation.”
“I like to focus on what I’m doing.”
She got up from her own station and moved to stand behind Sabbath, then rested her hands on his shoulders as he moved his arms up and down against a resistance force equal to his body mass times Venus surface gravity. This was intended to build his stamina more than strength—on the North Angle of Maxwell Montes he’d have to do that for hours with only occasional rests. His implant was flooding his muscles with chemical signals to expand blood vessels and promote new cell growth.
Zoya was more concerned with the aesthetics of what he was doing, and slid her hands down to feel the muscles of his back as they tensed and relaxed. “Why the sudden exercise mania? It’s not your usual style.”
“Oh, well, if you must know: I’m feeling a little physically inadequate as a biological in a world of big powerful mechs, and this is a desperate and futile attempt to overcome that.”
She took half a second to process that—and as before there was a lot of traffic to and from her head on the local network. Finally she gave his latissimus dorsi muscles a little squeeze and said “You don’t feel inadequate to me.”
He smiled tolerantly at that but continued his set, working toward one hundred repetitions. She slid her arms around him and ran her hands over his chest and stomach muscles.
What made it all so weird was how calm both of them were. Sabbath’s skin was flushed, but that was because he was generating about half a kilowatt of waste heat and his body was dumping it all into the air. Otherwise he showed no sign of a physical response. And as for Zoya Dukra, despite being dressed and behaving like something out of a sex sim for pubescent boys, she showed no indications of arousal at all.
“You’re going up the mountain, aren’t you? That’s what all this is about.”
“I can’t keep anything secret from you, can I?” He finished his set and the station began to reshape itself so he could work on his legs. “Excuse me for a second,” he said to Zoya as he changed position.
“There’s no point in going up,” she said. “Ishtar Security already did their investigation. Everything’s in the report. You won’t find any new data.”
“I’m learning a lot already,” he said. “I’m learning who doesn’t want me to go. Still not sure why, yet.” He began moving his legs back and forth against the same resistance as before, but at a much faster cadence.
Zoya trailed her fingertips along the sides of his neck. “You’re wasting your time. Wouldn’t you rather spend it doing something more fun?” Her face—above and behind his head where he couldn’t see—was expressionless despite the teasing tone of her voice.
“We can celebrate my climb together when I come back,” he replied, already breathing rapidly.
“‘When’? I think you mean ‘if,’” she said. “I’ll be seeing you,” she added, and headed for the hot soaking room, peeling off her loose top as she went.
I crawled out from behind Sabbath’s exercise station and jumped onto the back of his seat. “Why didn’t you go off to exchange fluids like last time?”
“I promised Sonogong I’d work off five kilos. Also: not really interested in going through that again.”
“Her last remark sounded distinctly threatening.”
“You think? And such a nice young lady, too. You’ve made me lose count—how many reps have I done?”
“Forty-two with each leg. Now forty-three.”
“Tell me when I hit a hundred.”
He did an extra-long session in the gym—I suspect he was giving Zoya Dukra plenty of time to go away—had a long hot soak up in his room, and went off to practice climbing with Sonogong as usual.
The fourth day was the same as the first two, right up to the point when Sabbath arrived at Sonogong’s climbing school at 1700 sharp. The door didn’t open for him, and when he pinged Sonogong’s comm he got a “declined” response.
That disturbed Sabbath to such an extent that he actually raised one eyebrow before sending out a barrage of messages and even physically knocking on the door. He raised such a commotion that after three minutes we heard Sonogong’s voice from inside, muffled by the locked door. “Go away.”
“We have a practice session—”
“Go away! I’m not doing it. Find another guide!”
Sabbath stood there looking at the locked door, then said calmly, “Well, at least he gave me a refund.”
He walked slowly back to the nearest bubble terminal, only half paying attention to where he was going. By the time he did get a bubble he gave an irritated sigh. “By a remarkable coincidence it appears that all the other mountain guides in Ishtar are also unavailable right now, at least to Shoken Samedi.”
“Any reason given?”
“None. I conclude that the Ishtar Security Bureau has made it known that taking my money is bad for business.”
He was silent during the bubble ride, but as he entered the Hotel Tanit he smiled. “Well, no reason to live on protein broth and basil water any longer. I think I want to be bad tonight.” He directed his steps toward a public bar off the hotel lobby and took a seat at a corner booth, with a solid wall at his back and good sight lines to both the entrance and the doors to the staff area.
The food printer built into the tabletop constructed a little plate of smoked salmon and toast, but Sabbath merely waited.
After fifteen minutes a little deputation of live servers emerged from the staff area. I had an instant of panic when I saw that the figure in the lead was a penguin, but relaxed when I realized it was the manager, a mech in a smart matter body. I have some bad memories about penguins.
Behind it were two humans in hurriedly printed formal tunics. The male bore a tray with three bottles, an orange, and a covered bowl on it, and the female had an identical tray with a single glass, frosty with condensation.
“The gentleman ordered the Tanit Heritage Champagne Cocktail?” asked the penguin mech. Sabbath nodded.
The table generated a cloth napkin and the female set the glass down in the exact center. She paused.
“Sugar cube soaked in bitters,” said the manager. “The sugar is naturally grown here in Ishtar, the bitters are hand-brewed by Jablokov et cie on Wheel Two.” The woman used a pair of gold tongs to place a cube of sugar from the bowl into the glass, then added a few drops of bitters and waited until they soaked into the sugar.
“Orange slice garnish. From the Popkes Zitroneria garden on the fourth sub-level of this arcology.” The woman cut a millimeter-thin section through the equator of the orange, rolled it up, and dropped it in next to the sugar cube.
“Zana 9941 brandy from Fratecea. Pre-revolution, naturally grown and fermented, distilled by traditional methods, transported in the bottle via Cycler. Never dehydrated,” said the penguin. The woman added thirty milliliters of the brandy to the glass.
“Clos de Vrigny champagne 9976 from northwest Europe on Earth. Grown from reconstructed grape strains, traditional production, shipped in the bottle,” said the penguin. The woman opened the bottle with an audible pop of escaping gas, then added 150 milliliters to the mix in the glass. Immediately a stream of bubbles began forming around the sugar cube.
“Enjoy your drink, sir,” said the penguin. Sabbath raised his glass in a sort of toast to the three of them, took a sip, and nodded. The three of them bowed, and then the penguin asked, “Will the gentleman be needing another?”
“Leave the champagne. No sense in letting it go to waste.”
A bot came hurrying up with a bucket of ice water and the woman placed the bottle into it, then all of them withdrew. Sabbath took a bite of salmon on toast before sipping his cocktail again.
“You just spent thirty thousand gigajoule credits for a drink. That’s a hundred and sixty-six per milliliter.”
“Don’t forget the salmon plate.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t order a whole live salmon, taught to sing and tap-dance.”
“I’m not that hungry tonight. Besides, you should be glad. Every gig I waste on expense-account meals is wealth my employers can’t use on something you disapprove of.”
“They don’t care that you’re helping Ishtar’s economy in the process?”
“My bosses want to do business with Ishtar—the more the better. Every millijoule you give someone means you have influence over them.”
Showing persistence worthy of a digital intelligence, the very next morning Sabbath went back to what he had been doing when Zoya Dukra first interrupted him: trying to get information from Marya Arani.
This time he used a more subtle method of getting to the restricted 715th floor of the Dvorets Neba arcology. He contacted the same chaikhana where he and Zoya had stopped for tea and pastry before sex, and spun a plausible story about having left something behind. They put him on the access list, so he could take a bubble to the park surrounding the central atrium without having to climb any walls.
He strolled casually toward the secure passage leading to Arani’s door, but he never reached it. When he was halfway across the park, two women sitting on a bench stood up and matched his pace, flanking him.
“Shoken Samedi?” asked one of them. They were both tall, with shaven heads and matching suits—and I could tell their suits, like Sabbath’s, were morphing smart matter, so the identical look was deliberate.
“That’s me,” he said, slowing his pace but not stopping.
“Grushanka, Ishtar Security Bureau.”
He nodded politely. “Pleased to meet you.” He glanced at the other one. “And you are?”
She looked back, stone-faced and silent. “Emyata,” said Grushanka.
Their comm tags matched what they said, and I spent about a tenth of a second checking with the ISB to see if they really were who they claimed to be. In the end all I could determine was that the Security Bureau did employ two officers with those names, and the listed comms did match the two women with Sabbath.
“Mind telling us what you’re doing here? This is a restricted floor.”
“Taking a stroll in the park before getting some of the best tea I’ve ever had. Would you two like to join me for a cup? They have rugelach.”
“You’ve been poking around the Ponardo San case,” said Emyata.
Sabbath didn’t turn to look at her, keeping his gaze on Grushanka. “I am investigating on behalf of my employers, Zadig Underwriters.”
“Of Deimos,” said Grushanka. “Ponardo San was a citizen of Clarion, and this is Ishtar. You aren’t licensed here, and your bosses don’t have any pull here. In our eyes, you’re just a nosy tourist.”
“I’m aware of that. But why do I rate not one but two ISB agents to tell me what I already know? Aside from getting off on the wrong floor of a building I’m not breaking any Ishtar laws or causing trouble. Did I do something by mistake?”
“Just being here’s a big mistake,” said Emyata to the back of Sabbath’s head.
“The Bureau is concerned that you might cause unnecessary disturbance by meddling. The death of Ponardo San was investigated, determined to be an accident, and the case is closed,” said Grushanka.
“If the case is closed then I can scarcely be interfering in any official investigation. As you say, I’m just being a nosy tourist. What’s the harm in that?”
“The harm is that you might bother someone who doesn’t want to be bothered, and who has the pull to make sure it doesn’t happen. Last warning, Samedi.”
He stopped walking very abruptly, and must have alerted his suit in advance because its feet stuck to the sidewalk and the smart matter kept him from pitching forward. The two cops shot past, stopped, and turned. Their suits flowed over their heads and hands and shifted to official red and gold, ready for combat.
Sabbath just stood calmly, smiling faintly. “If you’d care to give me an official instruction, duly authorized, naturally I’ll do what you ask.”
Emyata took a step to the side to keep a clear line of sight, while Grushanka stepped forward and the material covering her face went transparent. “No need for any of that. This isn’t official—this is just us giving you some friendly advice. If you’re smart, you’ll take it.”
“I’ll keep what you said in mind.”
“You do that. Have a nice day,” she said, and extended her hand in an old-fashioned gesture. Sabbath didn’t hesitate: Keeping his eyes locked on hers, he took her hand for a shake.
I could hear the bones crack as Grushanka’s amplified smartmatter suit glove squeezed Sabbath’s unprotected hand. He kept his eyes on hers and didn’t react, although I could see the muscles clench on the sides of his head as he kept himself from crying out.
“Until next time, then,” he said, and nodded politely to both of them before turning his back and strolling away.
His own suit flowed over his injured hand, even as it began to swell and turn mottled purple.
“We’d better find you a medical pod,” I said aloud when we were out of sight of the two ISB goons.
“That can wait,” he said. “First I need to disappear.” As soon as we boarded a bubble he asked me, “Pick a number from 1 to 251,594.”
“Okay: 77,413. What do I win?”
“A walk outside and a new hotel room. Let’s go dark now.” His suit shut down all electromagnetic emissions—no tags, no comm locator, nothing. I did likewise. We’d have to communicate entirely by voice.
The bubble shot down the core of the arcology and then followed a tube curving out of the city and along the south edge of the plateau, heading for the shuttle port. Had Sabbath decided to give up and leave?
He looked at the carpet on the floor of the bubble. “Is that self-cleaning?”
“No. Inert matter. They must use goo to clean it.”
“Good,” he said, and then did something very weird: His suit retracted off of his feet and he rubbed his bare soles vigorously all over the carpeted floor.
“You’re trying to leave DNA lying around?”
“Exactly. Every other passenger who rides in this bubble will track it all over Ishtar. If you can’t avoid leaving traces, create false positives.”
He sat cross-legged without touching the floor again until the bubble stopped at a place called Yuzhny Krugozor Surface Park. Sabbath got out, keeping his right hand at his side. The bubble station had a little commercial concourse attached, with places advertising surface tours, suit rental, and geology instructionals. I wondered if any of them cited Tiejiang Jian’s work.
Sabbath went directly to the nearest airlock, and I had to trot to keep up.
On Venus you can’t just push through a membrane to go outside. The atmosphere is thinner than it used to be, but it’s still four times as dense as Earth’s. They keep the arcologies at one bar pressure, because that’s what Earth-evolved bodies like best. So Sabbath had to wait for the airlock to cycle and stepped out into the equivalent of forty meters underwater. His suit was up to the task, going rigid around his torso to let him keep breathing, and recycling his breath so that his blood wouldn’t fill up with dissolved nitrogen ready to fizz as soon as he stepped back inside.
We walked out onto Venus. It was actually rather pleasant—for a mech like me, anyway. Back in the bad old days Venus had a truly massive atmosphere, with ninety bars of pressure at the surface, almost entirely carbon dioxide. Decades before the first digital minds humans proposed terraforming the place by seeding the atmosphere with some suitable extremophile algae which could survive in the molten-lead temperatures and high acidity. Superficially, it sounded like a good idea: turn all that nasty heat-retaining carbon dioxide into oxygen and biomass.
Except . . . that meant they’d have a planet with an atmosphere of pure oxygen at sixty bars pressure. It’s hard to think of anything that wouldn’t burn under those conditions, and all that biomass would be at the head of the line. Plus nobody could figure out how to change the planet’s rotation, at least any method which wouldn’t require geological time scales.
Eventually they settled on just putting a big sunshade at the L1 position to intercept all the incoming energy, and let the whole place cool off to about 190 Kelvins, which froze all the carbon dioxide and made it a place no worse than ten thousand other moons and asteroids.
On the Ishtar plateau, the residual heat leaking from the arcology towers was enough to keep the ground free of carbon dioxide snow, so Sabbath and I trudged across crumbly, slightly corrosive bare dirt. For about a kilometer around the surface access lock the ground was trampled flat by generations of Ishtar residents venturing out onto the surface for a couple of hours and then never leaving the controlled environment inside the arcologies for years at a time.
The view was impressive. Off to the south the land sloped abruptly down to the great rolling plain of Guinevere Planitia, a mass of darkness lit by flashing warning lights and the glow of radiators as mining machines like Tiejiang Jian methodically tore up the planet. Above the dark rim of the horizon the sky was a brilliant haze of golden glitter, the reflected light of millions of habs and smaller stations circling Venus. And dominating the sky was the bright foreshortened half-circle of one of the Epicycles, just rolling out of the sunshade’s cone of shadow.
Sabbath spared a minute or two to admire the prospect, but didn’t linger. Instead the two of us headed north into the built-up cityscape. The gaps between the huge arcology structures were crammed with cargo and passenger tubes: conduits for data, energy, and matter. The surface was covered by roadways of fused regolith for emergency and construction vehicles.
But among the titanic pipes and passages, some defiant lovers of the great outdoors had managed to find space for a dedicated path for pedestrians and light muscle-powered vehicles. It wound among the support pillars for heavy freight conveyors, dipped under the bubble tubes, and in a few spots ran along the top of massive data fiber bundles. On either side the diamond and glass-block towers rose kilometers above the surface. The wind blew fitfully, changing direction abruptly as we moved among the towers.
“Where are we going and when are you going to get that hand fixed?” I asked Sabbath.
“We are going to the 77,413th establishment on the list of hotels and guest houses in Ishtar. I’m not taking off this suit until I’m in a relatively secure space. It’s supporting the broken bones and my medical implant’s blocking the pain. I’ll be okay.”
“Why the sudden relocation?”
“Officers Grushanka and Emyata were waiting for me. That confirms my suspicion that my room at the Hotel Tanit is under surveillance—and that Ishtar Security is involved. I want a bit more freedom of action, especially if they’ve decided to get rough.”
His suit went into chameleon mode, becoming almost invisible in the ultraviolet and visual range. I did likewise, and because I am old and cunning I made my upper surface the same temperature as the ground beneath me, routing all my heat emission to my hidden underside.
Sabbath and his suit must have researched and planned out a whole bunch of escape-and-evasion routes during his long and self-indulgent meal breaks and baths, as he walked quickly, with no hesitation. We followed the pedestrian trail for a kilometer northward along the base of one arcology tower, then cut west through a rugged section between two large pyramids, where all the conveyors and bubble tubes were well above the surface. The pyramids were both two kilometers wide at the base, but right between them, exactly halfway from corner to corner, Sabbath had found a surface lock for emergency vehicles.
The lock was a big cylinder twenty meters wide, sticking up three meters out of the rocky surface. The top of it was made to open in half a dozen wedges for flying vehicles and bots, but one side of the cylinder had a door right at ground level, scaled for most biologicals. Even a dragon or a giant could get through, though they’d probably have to duck.
Inside a big elevator platform was set in the floor for vehicles, with a smaller hatch for pedestrians to one side, which opened onto a set of stairs spiraling around the inside of the big pipe. I followed Sabbath down, eventually emerging into a roadway tunnel lined with more conduits. Evidently a maintenance passage, as there wasn’t any traffic.
A catwalk along the side led in turn to a sturdy-looking door which refused to open because both of us were still emission-dark, so as far as the door was concerned we didn’t exist. Sabbath traced around the edge of it with one finger of his left hand until he found the lock, and then his suit extended tiny smartmatter tentacles into the mechanism and slid back the bolt.
Even though I am technically an entirely digital being, who just happens to occupy a body, over the centuries I’ve gained a great respect for the physical world, especially the way that brute force can overcome problems. Sabbath had the foresight to locate the sensor which tracked whether the door was open or shut, and put a squishy smartmatter finger on it, so we slipped back into Ishtar without any trace at all.
The door led us into a busy pedestrian concourse lined with stalls selling hand-prepared foods and “curated” printed meals. Sabbath took advantage of the crowd, moving with groups whenever possible, shifting his suit color and his body language to make it hard for anyone, digital or biological, to track him visually.
He followed what felt like a random trajectory through the concourse, switching direction constantly, but ultimately wound up at another bubble tube. We rode down ten levels to an area dominated by water- and air-processing machinery. But tucked among the tanks and ducts was a little neighborhood of a couple of thousand biologicals, with apartments and some storefronts on two levels around a little plaza with elaborate fountains. A dozen young humans and chimps were playing a game involving running around, climbing on things, yelling, and splashing each other with fountain water. I’m told that sort of thing is essential for brain development.
On the upper level Sabbath stopped at what looked like a normal apartment door, except that it boasted a projected sign and matching virtual tag:
Step Into History!
HOMEWORLD HOUSE
Authentic Historical Guest Experiences
Traditional Cuisines From Earth’s Past
Short- and Long-Term Guests Welcome!