The room had a scattering of chairs around a central table, a worktop along one side equipped with screens and a holo-viewer, and closets and drawers beneath. It was used for meetings and mini-conferences. Sariena sat across the table, still striking with her shoulder-length dark hair, dusky brown skin, and sultry, light gray eyes with their curious hint of opalescence, but looking tired. She was one of the Kronian planetary scientists that Vicki had gotten to know from a distance through working with Keene back on Earth, and then had come to Earth as part of the Kronian delegation sent to plead its case for a more vigorous and wider-ranging space effort.
Visiting along with Sariena was a former project manager from JPL in California called Charlie Hu. Of Asian origins, in his fifties, with streaky graying hair and trimmed beard, he had come from Earth with the same group that had included Vicki and Keene. These days he was working with Sariena in one of the orbiting observatories on recomputing the changed Solar System dynamics—a risky undertaking in view of the exposure, but there was no other way for the work to get done. Charlie often said that he’d heard all there could be to make him revise beliefs that he had accepted as uncontroversial when he graduated in planetary astronomy long ago. Now, the look on his face was saying that the Kronians had sent his thinking into a whirl once again.
Sariena and Charlie had come to Kropotkin at Vicki’s suggestion to hear more about Farzhin’s work. She hoped it would excite their interest sufficiently to bring it to the attention of the people they worked with, who represented the more mainstream view. Although the distances within the Saturnian moon system seemed vast compared to what Terrans had been accustomed to, the small gravity wells and high speeds of Kronian transorbital vessels put journey times about on par with jetting around Earth in former days.
Sariena regarded Farzhin at some length. Vicki could almost sense her checking over what he had said point by point. Finally, she said, “If Venus goes back that far . . . then it couldn’t have been a newly created comet at the time of the Exodus.”
Farzhin nodded. “I agree. But then I don’t think that the Exodus event involved a newly created, planet-size comet. For one thing, it wasn’t violent enough. Oh, the calamities that the accounts talk about were bad enough, yes—and the others things recorded around the world at that time. But they weren’t on the kind of scale you’d expect with an object that hot, almost as big as Earth itself. Agni, on the other hand, was truly terrifying, searing the Earth, destroying whole regions totally. Humanity came close to being wiped out. In fact, I think that could have been what created the great desert belts—they still hadn’t recovered, even after all that time. It’s more what you’d expect.”
Charlie Hu looked questioningly at Sariena. “You know, after seeing how violent the effects of Athena were compared to Exodus, I’ve wondered the same thing. This does sound more like proto-Venus.” Sariena nodded but was still far away in thought. Charlie looked back at Farzhin. “So are we talking about later encounters with Venus in a cooled-down phase?” He frowned. “But no—you said there were only two.”
“I tried fitting Venus with various later events that the Vedas describe, but it just didn’t work,” Farzhin said. “We chewed it over this way and that, trying to make sense of all the different things the ancient Sanskrit records talk about. And the upshot is, we think that the Exodus encounter was one of a different series that happened later.”
“Different?” Charlie repeated. “You mean with something else? Not Venus at all?”
“Exactly,” Farzhin said.
“What, then?”
“We think it was Mars.”
Sariena’s eyes interrogated him silently. Finally, she said, “That would change a lot of things that we thought we were sure about.”
The current Kronian model had Venus approaching Earth periodically after the Exodus encounter to bring times of turmoil and unrest—but of reducing severity—until around the Roman era, when an interaction with Mars caused it to recede finally to the orbit found in modern times. However, Farzhin was saying that the interaction between Venus and Mars happened much earlier, and it was Mars, not Venus, that had continued to visit the Earth on a repeating basis thereafter. Vicki was impressed that Sariena was able so matter-of-factly to consider a proposition which, if true, would bring tumbling down a whole area of Kronian planetary science that she herself had spent years helping to put together. A comparable reaction from the halls of Terran academia would have been all but unthinkable.