He made a grisly imitation of a smile to the interviewers’ opening question and replied, “Yes, I am going to Venus. It seems only fair that I should take this very generous prize money from Martin Humphries–the man who destroyed my business and took my wife from me more than thirty years ago.”
That brought a barrage of questions from the reporters. I froze the image and delved into the hypertext records.
Fuchs had an impressive background. He had been born poor, but built a sizable fortune for himself out in the Asteroid Belt, as a prospector. Then he started his own asteroidal mining company and became one of the major operators in the Belt, until Humphries Space Systems undercut his prices so severely that Fuchs was forced into bankruptcy. HSS then bought out the company for a fraction of its true worth. My father had personally taken control and fired Fuchs from the firm that the man had founded and developed over two decades.
While Fuchs stayed out in the Asteroid Belt, penniless and furious with helpless rage, his wife left him and married Martin Humphries. She became my father’s fourth and last wife.
I gasped with sudden understanding. She was my mother! The mother I had never known. The mother who had died giving birth to me six years afterward. The mother whose drug addiction had saddled me with chronic anemia from birth. I stared at her image on the screen: young, with the flaxen hair and pale blue eyes of the icy northlands. She was very beautiful, yet she looked fragile, delicate, like a flower that blooms on a glacier for only a day and then withers.
It took an effort to erase her image and go back to the news file. Fuchs had taken off for Venus in a specially modified ship he had named Lucifer. The Latin name for Venus as the morning star was Lucifer. It was also the name used by the Hebrew prophet Isaiah as a synonym for Satan.
Lucifer. And Fuchs. After a high-g flight, he was already in orbit around Venus, more than a week ahead of me. Sitting there in my stateroom, staring at Fuchs’ sardonic, sneering face on the wall screen, I remembered that the time had come to transfer to Hesperos. There was no way to get out of it. I still wished I was home and safe, but now I knew that I had to go through with this mission no matter what the dangers.
But my thoughts went back to my mother. I had never known that she was once Fuchs’ wife. My father hardly ever spoke of her, except to blame me for her death. Alex had told me that it wasn’t my fault, that women didn’t die in childbirth unless there was something terribly wrong. It was Alex who told me about her drug dependency; as far as my father was concerned she was faultless.
“She was the only woman I ever really loved,” he said, many a time. I almost believed him. Then he would add, cold as liquid helium, “And you killed her, Runt.”
A single rap on my door startled me. Before I could respond, Desiree Duchamp slid the door open and gave me a hard stare.
She wore the same dun-colored flight coveralls as everyone else aboard ship, but on her they looked crisper, sharper, almost like a military uniform. Her eyes were large and luminous. She might have been beautiful if she would smile, but the expression on her face was severe, bitter, almost angry.
“Are you coming or not?” she demanded.
I drew myself up to my full height–not quite eye to eye with my captain–and forced my voice to be steady and calm as I answered, “Yes. I’m ready.”
When she turned and headed down the passageway I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to conjure up a picture of my brother. I’m doing this for you, Alex, I said to myself. I’m going to find out why you died–and who’s responsible for your death.
But as I headed down the passageway after Duchamp, the image in my mind was of my mother, so young and lovely and vulnerable.