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  The Venging

  Greg Bear

  An [ e - reads ] Book

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1983 by Greg Bear

  First e-reads publication 1999

  www.e-reads.com

  ISBN 0-7592-0076-9

  Author Biography

  Greg Bear's stories and novels have won him an important place in the science fiction community. Initially, Bear was an illustrator for SF novels in the 1970's. He has since gone on to a prolific writing career. His short story, Blood Music, which he later rewrote as a novel, won him both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. His acclaimed work includes DINOSAUR SUMMER, ANVIL OF STARS, ETERNITY and DARWIN'S RADIO. He is married and lives in Washington State.

  Preface

  I have had a passion for science fiction and fantasy ever since I can remember. Science fiction has been a wonderful mother for my mind, showing me that the world is far bigger and stranger than it seems within my province. And in the past few years—after many more years of apprenticeship—it has become a fine, broad landscape on which to test my imagination.

  Occasionally I've felt the pressure of limited editors and markets, but I have yet to run up against an artistic boundary. If a thought is expressible in human language, a science fiction story can be written about it. The same cannot be said of any other genre.

  Through reading science fiction, I became interested in other forms of literature, in astronomy and the sciences, in history and philosophy. Specifically, discovering James Blish's Case of Conscience when I was sixteen led me to read James Joyce; L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Poul Anderson, and others have given me solid reasons to explore history. Arthur C. Clarke—and through Clarke, Olaf Stapledon—sent me on a wild search through philosophy, looking for similar insights and experiences. (I've usually been disappointed; Stapledon is unique.) In short, my intellect has been nurtured and guided by science fiction.

  Some people, reading the above, will sneer the ineradicable sneer. The hell with them. C. P. Snow pinned their little grey moth in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution; they are ignorant or afraid of science. They reject the universe in favor of a small human circle, limited in time and place to their own lifetimes. You are not one of them if you have read this far. You are one of the brave ones.

  So I will open my heart to you a little bit and talk about the stories that follow.

  I have friends who believe the world will come to an end in twenty or thirty years. They foresee complete collapse, perhaps nuclear war. They look on the prospect with either stunned indifference or some relish. Serve everybody right, they seem to say.

  What they are actually saying is that within the next few decades—certainly within the next sixty or seventy years—they will come to an end. Their world will darken. And, solipsists that many of us are, it seems perfectly logical to take everybody and everything with us. The future does not really exist, certainly not the far and unknowable future. Why talk about it?

  They are still my friends, but they are as wrong as wrong can be. The future will come, and it will be different, unimaginably so. Then why do I bother to try imagining it?

  I could sing you a long number on how science fiction is seldom intended to be prophetic. But I'm willing to bet, in our deepest hearts, that we all hope one of our more optimistic imagined futures, or some aspect of a literary time to come, will closely parallel reality. Then we will be admired for our perspicacity. People in the future, if they still read, might come across an even more fantastic concept and say, "Hey, that crazy Greg Bear stuff!"

  Perhaps. But it will be accident, not prophecy.

  Like my pessimistic friends, I'm not going to live forever. I may see the first starships; I may not.

  But when I write, I not only live to see one future, I experience dozens. I chart their courses, lay out histories, try to create new cultures and extend the range of discovery. When I write—

  When I write, I'm immortal.

  Sometimes I enter into a kind of trance state and engage so many thoughts and ideas and abilities that I seem to rise onto another plane. And though I seldom think about it while I'm on that plane, I seem to become everyone who has ever thought about the future. I join the greats, past and present, at least for a moment.

  I've been writing since I was eight or nine years old. In 1966, when I was fifteen, through something of a fluke I sold my first professional short story. Five years passed before I sold another. The apprenticeship is still not over, and may never be. None of those earlier efforts are represented in this collection; the earliest piece here, "Mandala," was written in 1975 and first appeared in 1978. It also comprises the first third of my novel, Strength of Stones, published in 1981.

  There isn't much remarkable to record about the writing of these stories. Writing is usually quite dull to an outside observer. It consists of long periods of apparent loafing around, punctuated by hours at a typewriter, highlighted by moments of desk-pounding and finger-chewing puzzlement. (All this, to contrast with the above-mentioned trance state.)

  "Mandala" and "Hardfought" were about equally difficult to write, for different reasons. "The White Horse Child" was one of the easiest; like "Scattershot," it emerged while I sat at the typewriter, consciously unaware of what was going to pour out. "Petra" went through several stages, becoming progressively stranger and stranger. (One of the great difficulties with creativity is trying to impose order on the results.)

  "The Wind from a Burning Woman" also began as an exercise in sitting blankly at the typewriter. As in most instances where such stories turn out well, there was a strong emotion lurking behind the apparent blankness—that of repugnance to terrorism. Do the weak have the fight to force the strong to do their bidding by terrorist action? To handle the issue honestly, I had to make the "Burning Woman" fight for a cause that I, myself, would cherish. One editor, reading the story for an anthology on space colonies, rejected it because it didn't overtly support the cause. It would have been dishonest to force the story into such a mold; however pleasant or unpleasant the result, my stories must work themselves out within their own framework, not according to some market principle or philosophical bias.

  It may be remarkable that, with such views, I've come as far as I have in publishing, where large conglomerates seem to dictate overall marketing of science fiction as if it were some piecework commodity. ("Take dragon/unicorn/spaceship, add vaguely medieval/magical setting, mix well with wise old wizard/cute sidekick …") Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed stories with all those elements, but enough is enough. Science fiction is much too restless to accept the same kind of genre regimentation displayed by, for example, Westerns or hard-boiled detective novels, where one Western Town or corrupt Big City can serve as stage settings for an infinity of retold tales.

  But enough authorial interference. I will tell you no more about these stories until we meet in person; perhaps not even then, for I'm not certain my interpretations are always correct. "Mandala," for example, has defied my analysis for seven years, and yet I knew what I wanted to say when I wrote it.

  That's when I'm happiest with my own work—when the stories say so many things that they become playgrounds for the mind. I hope you feel the same way.

  GREG BEAR

  Spring Valley, California

  For David Clark

  Contents<
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  The Wind from a Burning Woman

  The White Horse Child

  Petra

  Scattershot

  Mandala

  Hardfought

  The Venging

  The Wind from a Burning Woman

  Five years later the glass bubbles were intact, the wires and pipes were taut, and the city—strong across Psyche's surface like a dewy spider's web wrapped around a thrown rock—was still breathtaking. It was also empty. Hexamon investigators had swept out the final dried husks and bones. The asteroid was clean again. The plague was over.

  Giani Turco turned her eyes away from the port and looked at the displays. Satisfied by the approach, she ordered a meal and put her work schedule through the processor for tightening and trimming. She had six tanks of air, enough to last her three days. There was no time to spare. The robot guards in orbit around Psyche hadn't been operating for at least a year and wouldn't offer any resistance, but four small pursuit bugs had been planted in the bubbles. They turned themselves off whenever possible, but her presence would activate them. Time spent in avoiding and finally destroying them: one hour forty minutes, the processor said. The final schedule was projected in front of her by a pen hooked around her ear. She happened to be staring at Psyche when the readout began; the effect—red numerals and letters over grey rock and black space—was pleasingly graphic, like a film in training.

  Turco had dropped out of training six weeks early. She had no need for a final certificate, approval from the Hexamon, or any other nicety. Her craft was stolen from Earth orbit, her papers and cards forged, and her intentions entirely opposed to those of the sixteen corporeal desks. On Earth, some hours hence, she would be hated and reviled.

  The impulse to sneer was strong—pure theatrics, since she was alone—but she didn't allow it to break her concentration. (Worse than sheep, the seekers-after-security, the cowardly citizens who tacitly supported the forces that had driven her father to suicide and murdered her grandfather; the seekers-after-security who lived by technology but believed in the just influences: Star, Logos, Fate, and Pneuma…)

  To calm her nerves, she sang a short song while she selected her landing site.

  The ship, a small orbital tug, touched the asteroid like a mote settling on a boulder and made itself fast. She stuck her arms and legs into the suit receptacles, and the limb covers automatically hooked themselves to the thorax. The cabin was too cramped to get into a suit any other way. She reached up and brought down the helmet, pushed until all the semifluid seals seized and beeped, and began the evacuation of the cabin's atmosphere. Then the cabin parted down the middle, and she floated slowly, fell more slowly still, to Psyche's surface.

  She turned once to watch the cabin clamp together and to see if the propulsion rods behind the tanks had been damaged by the unusually long journey. They'd held up well.

  She took hold of a guide wire after a flight of twenty or twenty-five meters and pulled for the nearest glass bubble. Five years before, the milky spheres had been filled with the families of workers setting the charges that would form Psyche's seven internal chambers. Holes had been bored from the Vlasseg and Janacki poles, on the narrow ends of the huge rock, through the center. After the formation of the chambers, materials necessary for atmosphere would have been pumped into Psyche through the boreholes while motors increased her natural spin to create artificial gravity inside.

  In twenty years, Psyche's seven chambers would have been green and beautiful, filled with hope—and passengers. But now the control-bubble hatches had been sealed by the last of the investigators. Since Psyche was not easily accessible, even in its lunar orbit, the seals hadn't been applied carefully. Nevertheless, it took her an hour to break in. The glass ball towered above her, a hundred feet in diameter, translucent walls mottled by the shadows of rooms and equipment. Psyche rotated once every three hours, and light from the sun was beginning to flush the tops of the bubbles in the local cluster. Moonlight illuminated the shadows. She pushed the rubbery cement seals away, watching them float lazily to the pocked ground. Then she examined the airlock to see if it was still functioning. She wanted to keep the atmosphere inside the bubble, to check it for psychotropic chemicals; she would not leave her suit at any rate.

  The locked door opened with a few jerks and closed behind her. She brushed crystals of frost off her faceplate and the inner lock door's port. Then she pushed the button for the inner door, but nothing happened. The external doors were on a different power supply, which was no longer functioning—or, she hoped, had only been turned off.

  From her backpack she removed a half-meter pry bar. The break-in took another fifteen minutes. She was now five minutes ahead of schedule.

  Across the valley, the fusion power plants that supplied power to the Geshel populations of Tijuana and Chula Vista sat like squat mountains of concrete. By Naderite law, all nuclear facilities were enclosed by multiple domes and pyramids, whether they posed any danger or not. The symbolism was two-fold—it showed the distaste of the ruling Naderites for energy sources that were not nature-kinetic, and it carried on the separation of Naderites-Geshels. Farmer Kollert, advisor to the North American Hexamon and ecumentalist to the California corporeal desk, watched the sun set behind the false peak and wondered vaguely if there was any symbolism in the act. Was not fusion the source of power for the sun? He smiled. Such things seldom occurred to him; perhaps it would amuse a Geshel technician.

  His team of five Geshel scientists would tour the plants two days from now and make their report to him. He would then pass on his report to the desk, acting as interface for the invariably clumsy, elitist language the Geshel scientist used. In this way, through the medium of advisors across the globe, the Naderites oversaw the production of Geshel power. By their grants and control of capital, his people had once plucked the world from technological overkill, and the battle was ongoing still—a war against some of mankind's darker tendencies.

  He finished his evening juice and took a package of writing utensils from the drawer in the veranda desk. The reports from last month's energy consumption balancing needed to be edited and revised, based on new estimates—and he enjoyed doing the work himself, rather than giving it to the library computer persona. It relaxed him to do things by hand. He wrote on a positive feedback slate, his scrawly letters adjusting automatically into script, with his tongue between his lips and a pleased frown creasing his brow.

  "Excuse me, Farmer." His ur-wife, Gestina, stood in the French doors leading to the veranda. She was as slender as when he had married her, despite fifteen years and two children.

  "Yes, cara, what is it?" He withdrew his tongue and told the slate to store what he'd written.

  "Josef Krupkin."

  Kollert stood up quickly, knocking the metal chair over. He hurried past his wife into the dining room, dropped his bulk into a chair, and drew up the crystalline cube on the alabaster tabletop. The cube adjusted its picture to meet the angle of his eyes, and Krupkin appeared.

  "Josef! This is unexpected."

  "Very," Krupkin said. He was a small man with narrow eyes and curly black hair. Compared to Kollert's bulk, he was dapper—but thirty years behind a desk had given him the usual physique of a Hexamon backroomer. "Have you ever heard of Giani Turco?"

  Kollert thought for a moment. "No, I haven't. Wait—Turco. Related to Kimon Turco?"

  "Daughter. California should keep better track of its radical Geshels, shouldn't it?"

  "Kimon Turco lived on the Moon."

  "His daughter lived in your district."

  "Yes, fine. What about her?" Kollert was beginning to be perturbed. Krupkin enjoyed roundabouts even in important situations—and to call him at this address, at such a time, something important had happened.

  "She's calling for you. She'll only talk to you, none of the rest. She won't even accept President Praetori."

  "Yes. Who is she? What has she done?"

  "She's managed to start up Psyche. There was
enough reaction mass left in the Beckmann motors to alter it into an Earth-intersect orbit." The left side of the cube was flashing bright red, indicating the call was being scrambled.

  Kollert sat very still for a few seconds. There was no need acting incredulous. Krupkin was in no position to joke. But the enormity of what he said—and the impulse to disbelieve, despite the bearer of the news—froze Kollert for an unusually long time. He ran his hand through lank blond hair.

  "Kollert," Krupkin said. "You look like you've been—"

  "Is she telling the truth?"

  Krupkin shook his head. "No, Kollert, you don't understand. She hasn't claimed these accomplishments. She hasn't said anything about them yet. She just wants to speak to you. But our tracking stations say there's no doubt. I've spoken with the officer who commanded the last inspection. He says there was enough mass left in the Beckmann drive positioning motors to push—"

  "This is incredible! No precautions were taken? The mass wasn't drained, or something?"

  "I'm no Geshel, Farmer. My technicians tell me the mass was left on Psyche because it would have cost several hundred million—"

  "That's behind us now. Let the journalists worry about that, if they ever hear of it." He looked up and saw Gestina still standing in the French doors. He held up his hand to tell her to stay where she was. She was going to have to keep to the house, incommunicado, for as long as it took to straighten this out.

  "You're coming?"

  "Which center?"

  "Does it matter? She's not being discreet. Her message is hitting an entire hemisphere, and there are hundreds of listening stations to pick it up. Several aren't under our control. Once anyone pinpoints the source, the story is going to be clear. For your convenience, go to Baja Station. Mexico is signatory to all the necessary pacts."