He looked at her and twisted the helmet off his head.
He got one whiff and his bold Slavic nose wrinkled all the way up into his forehead. “He lived in this for a week,”
he said.
She thought maybe the smell gave him a little better appreciation of McNeil, if not more respect for him. “Viktor, I want you to do something for me. It means us splitting up for a few minutes.”
“Before we’re finished in here? We still have to check on McNeil’s story.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve already got the important stuff.
I want you to get this evidence to the lab.”
“Inspector Troy”—going all formal on her—”my orders “Okay, Viktor, tell Captain Antreen everything you think you have to.”
“First you have to tell me,” he said, exasperated.
“I will. Then as soon as you get that stuff into the lab I want you to go out and intercept Helios. Before anybody disembarks. Keep them busy. . . .”
As soon as she had explained her suspicions and he understood them, he left. This business of being persuasive was draining, she found. Social intelligence—the peoplemanipulative intelligence—came hardest to her. Almost immediately, almost involuntarily, she collapsed into trance again.
The brief meditation restored her. As she allowed the external world to trickle back into her awareness, she began to listen. . . .
At first she did not filter or focus what she heard but took in the whole symphony of the great space station, spinning in space above Venus, its sounds vibrating through the wall of Star Queen. Gases and fluids coursed through its pumps and conduits, the bearings of its great hubs and rings rolled smoothly on their eternal rounds, the hum of thousands of circuits and high-voltage buses made the aether tremble. She could hear the muted voices of the station’s hundred thousand inhabitants, a third of them at work, a third breathing deeply, asleep, a third concerned with the rich trivia of existence, buying, selling, teaching, learning, cooking, eating, fighting, playing. . . .
Simply by listening, she could not pick out individual conversations. No one seemed to be talking in the immediate neighborhood. She could have tuned in on the radio transmissions and the communications links, of course, had she chosen to go into receptor state, but that was not her purpose. She wanted a feel for the place. What was it like to live in a metal world constantly orbiting a hell planet? A world with parks and gardens and shops and schools and restaurants, to be sure—a world with unparalleled views of the starry night and the brilliant sun—but a contained world, one from which only the rich could easily get relief. It was a world where people from disparate cultures—Japanese, Arab, Russian, North American— were thrown into close proximity under conditions that inevitably produced strain. Some came for the money, some because they had imagined that space would somehow be free of the restrictions of crowded Earth. Some came, of course, because their parents brought them. But only a few had the pioneering spirit that made hardship an end itself. Port Hesperus was a company town, like an oil platform in the North Atlantic or a mill town in the Canadian forest.
The message Sparta had through the metal walls was one of tension in reserve, of time bided, of a feeling close to indentured servitude. And there was something more, partly among the recent, reluctant immigrants but especially among the younger residents, those who had been born on the station—a sense of humdrum, a certain resentment, the half-conscious undercurrent of brewing discontent —but for now the older generation was firmly in charge, and they had little in mind beyond vigorously exploiting the resources of Venus’s surface, making themselves as comfortable as possible while they did so, and earning the wherewithal to get off Port Hesperus forever.
. . .
Almost a kilometer away from where Sparta drifted dreaming in the freighter, the off-duty life of Port Hes- perus was at its busiest. The enormous central sphere of the station was belted with tall trees—their tops all pointing inward—and ribbed with louvered glass windows that continually adjusted to compensate for the whirl of Venuslight and sunlight. Among the trees, paths wove among lush gardens of passion flowers and orchids and bromeliads, under cycads and tree ferns, beside trickling brooks and still reflecting ponds of recirculated water, over arched bridges of wood or stone.
A stroller who made the entire three-and-a-halfkilometer circuit would come upon seven strikingly different views, separately climate-controlled, laid out by the master landscape architect Seno Sato to suggest the diversity of cultures that had contributed to build Port Hesperus, and the mythic past of its mother planet. Step through this torii: here is Kyoto, an eaved castle, raked pebbles, twisted pines. Brush aside these tamarisk branches: Samarkand, its arabesque pavilions of inlaid blue stone reflected in perfumed pools. Through these bare birches to Kiev, blue onion domes above a frozen canal, where today two skaters circle. The snow underfoot becomes powdered marble, then plain sand: here is the Sphinx, in a garden of bare red rocks. Up this rocky path and past this flowering plum to vanished Changan, a seven-story stone pagoda with gilded finials. Through these yellow ginkgos the boat pond of New York’s Central Park appears, complete with toy schooners, watched over with perplexed amusement by the well-polished bronze of Alice. An aisle of silent hemlocks leads to Vancouver, dripping cedars and totem poles and verdigrised gargoyles.
And under these dripping tree ferns to the fern swamps of legendary, fictitious Venus, with a notable collection of carnivorous plants glistening in the eternal rain. Around this tall monkey-puzzle: Kyoto’s gate . . .
On either side of the magnificent gardens, in parallel belts around the central sphere, were the Casbah, plaka, Champs E´ lyse´es, Red Square, Fifth Avenue, and Main Street of Port Hesperus—shops, galleries, dime stores, Russian tea shops, rug merchants, restaurants of fifteen distinct ethnic persuasions, fish markets (aquacultured bream a specialty), fruit and vegetable markets, flower stands, temples, mosques, synagogues, churches, discreetly naughty cabarets, the Port Hesperus Performing Arts Center, and the streets outside jammed with shoppers and hawkers, jugglers and strolling musicians, people wearing bright metals and plastics and their own colorized skin.
Sato’s gardens brought wealthy tourists from throughout the solar system. Port Hesperus’s merchants and boosters were ready for them.
The central sphere was frequented by the station’s workers and families too, of course. It’s just that a Disney kind of world—even a Disney world equipped with a cosmopolitan selection of foods and beverages and real, sometimes kinky people—grows familiar after the fifth or sixth visit, and deadly dull after the hundredth. Every excuse for news, for a diversion, becomes precious. . . .
Which is why Vincent Darlington was in a snit.
Darlington waddled about the spectacularly gaudy main hall of the Hesperian Museum aimlessly straightening the baroque and rococo paintings in their ornate frames, trying to keep his fingers out of the piles of cultured shrimp and caviar and tiny lobster tails and synthetic ham rolls the caterers had hauled in by the kilo and which now gleamed oilily beneath the odd light of the room’s stained glass dome. Every few seconds Darlington returned to the empty display case at the head of the room—positioned where, had this place been a church, as its spectacularly intricate overarching stained glass apotheosis suggested, the altar would have stood. He drummed his chubby fingers on the gilt frame. It had been specially built to hold his newest acquisition, and he’d placed it where no one entering the museum could possibly miss it—especially that Sylvester woman, if she had the brass to come.
One reason he’d staged the reception. And invited someone, that oh-so-special someone, who was quite likely to drag her along. He hoped she did come; he couldn’t wait to see the hunger on her face. . . .
But now the whole thing was off. Or at least postponed.
First the news that his acquisition had been impounded.
Then the news just now that the police were delaying the disembarkation of Helios! What in heaven’s name could be so complicated about a simple accident in space . . . ?
Horribly embarrassing, but he certainly had no intention of reopening the Hesperian Museum until his treasure was safely enthroned.
Darlington pushed himself away from the empty altar.
He’d recoiled from the notion of mingling with the crowd of media persons and other rabble that had rushed to the security sector when Star Queen, at last, had arrived. He had subsequently placed one discreet call to the powersthat- be, urging—one might in fact say pleading, but only really in the gentlest possible fashion—that something be done about the red tape that prevented him from taking immediate delivery of the most valuable book in the entire history of the English language—and honestly now, if it weren’t the most valuable book, then why had he been forced to pay such an outrageous sum for it, surely the largest sum ever paid for a book in the English language in the history of the English language itself, and that surely said something . . . and out of his own pockets, which weren’t, shall we say, bottomless, after all . . . ?