“It was a pleasure, Viktor. If there’s any justice, it won’t be long until we . . .” Her commlink softly chimed. “One sec.”
She cocked her head and listened to the breathless dispatcher: “Inspector Troy! Inspector Troy! New orders from Earth Central! Your trip is canceled—you’re to report to headquarters right away.”
“What’s this about?” She looked up to see a squad of blue-suits already swimming toward them—her escort to unit headquarters.
A few seconds later, when she found time to answer Blake’s and Proboda’s insistent questions, all she could say was, “I’ll have to catch up with you later, Blake. I can’t tell you what’s happened. And you wouldn’t believe me if I did.”
Through the many-layered scandal that had absorbed their attention for the past weeks—through the burials and depositions and hearings and trials—the inhabitants of Port Hesperus had never ceased or even slowed their work.
Five of Ishtar’s huge new robots had gone to the surface immediately after the Star Queen impoundment was lifted.
The sixth was released to Ishtar and followed its fellows after forensic teams had lifted the last molecule of evidence from it and the ship it had ravaged.
The new robot corps was sent to explore a promising syncline on the glacis of the huge Lakshmi Plateau, in an area previously only lightly surveyed by surface rovers.
Among the ore samples gathered on these prospecting expeditions was one odd fragment now residing in the Hes- perian Museum—a fossil, one among only a dozen Venusian fossils.
It was not unexpected that when serious mining began in the region another fossil or two might appear. The operators on Port Hesperus had been asked to keep a close eye on their screens for just such an event.
The atmosphere of Venus is so dense at the surface and the light of the sun so diffuse that operating one of the glowing robots in many ways resembled operating a nodule miner on the bottom of Earth’s oceans. It was not always easy for an operator to know what he was seeing on the big screens. They showed him a bowl-shaped world with close horizons tilting sharply up on every side, the sere rock everywhere glowing a dark orange. Looking at such a screen was like looking at the world through the bottom of a thick ashtray of orange glass. To drive an immense robot up a narrow canyon and under the overhang of an arching stratified canyon, sampling rock outcrops every few yards, could be both strenuous and disorienting.
So the operator of the Rolls-Royce HDVM, alert as he was, may be forgiven for not immediately recognizing that the creature’s slashing proboscis had broken into a cavern that was not, as it first appeared, a natural hollow in the cliff. So bizarre were the forms suddenly illuminated by the glare of the white-hot radiators that the operator had only moments to react—moments dangerously extended by the radio delay of the remote signal—to prevent the destruction of the lines upon lines of carved inscriptions and the gaunt, monstrous representations that loomed up suddenly on his screen.
3 0 8 Afterword by PAUL PREUSS Aglance at the copyright page will show when the first of the six novels that make up the Venus Prime series was published. All six incorporate superb stories by Arthur C. Clarke, with the first volume based on Arthur’s novella “Breaking Strain.” My version of “Breaking Strain” had an earlier genesis, however, in a rather different form.
In the late 1980s, computer text games of the Adventure type—”You are standing in a small room painted white. In front of you is a door. In the ceiling there’s a trap door to the attic. On the floor lies a bloody axe,” and so on—had spawned a literary genre that would become known as hypertext. While the games were often Agatha- Christie-style mysteries, the sheer novelty of branching interactive text engaged many impressive talents; one, Robert Pinsky, was to become America’s poet laureate.
Interactive text was fun, and the serious stuff certainly raised intriguing issues concerning the pact between writer and reader, but animated graphics swiftly overwhelmed text on most personal computer screens. “Breaking Strain, The Game” never made it to diskette.
A few months earlier, when Byron Preiss had proposed the project and invited me to choose among Arthur’s stories one with the milieu and the maguffin to make a science-fiction mystery, I accepted happily. Clarke had been my favorite hard-science fiction writer since long before 2001, A Space Odyssey, and the chance to study how the master did it line by line, the chance to play in the same universe—at once both rational and humanistic— was appealing. In the movie business, they call it homage; in science fiction, the terms were to be less polite, but all that came later.
As for mystery material, “Breaking Strain” leaped out at me, a classic life-boat tale of the lone survivor, and sure enough, the maguffin was right there on Star Queen’s cargo manifest—that first-edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which Arthur was later surprised to find was not my invention but his own.
By the time the game died, I had gotten deeply involved.
I had a couple of hundred pages of script and flow charts that laid out everything which could be allowed to happen interactively (given personal-computer speed and memory of the time) from the moment Star Queen docked at Port Hesperus. I had made crude sketches of the ship and the station and the mining robots; artist Darrell Anderson had already transformed some of these into spare, elegant graphics, using programs of his own that were ahead of their time. I had a long list of all the things the bionic Sparta could do. Sparta’s tool kit even contained a Swiss Army knife for when things got really complicated.
There was one significant lack. As a character, Sparta was a hollow shell, a nobody. Or rather an anybody—anybody who might sit down at the keyboard to play the game, any “you” who found himself or herself in the airlock of Port Hesperus, challenged with this mystery. Any “you” at all, really, but assumed to be young, and of unspecified sex. For a computer game that was okay and, like Darrell’s graphics, maybe even a little ahead of its time.
A novel, however, depends crucially on such details as the age, sex, and history of its protagonist. When Byron asked me if I’d be interested in transmuting the canceled game into the first of a series of novels, I was eager to do so, not least because Sparta, conceived as a computerized nonentity, weighed heavily upon my storyteller’s conscience.
I agonized over whether Sparta was male or female for all of about ten minutes. Of course she was a young woman—the whole point of not specifying Sparta’s sex in the game was to invite girl players to identify with “you.”
And I had no trouble finding the foundations of her superhero status. My appreciation of psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is more explicitly acknowledged in the second volume of the series, but in fact I had earlier taken up the notion that monolithic IQ is a sham—that there are several different kinds of intelligence, and that they are more or less incommensurable.
Sparta was someone in whom multiple intelligences had been fostered from birth.
But the perversion of her talents, their bionic enhancement?
Her mysterious and fragmented past? For that impulse, although I suppose I have to acknowledge several parts mass-media influence and wishful thinking, I have no easy explanation. I’m not much for conspiracy theories.
Like the CIA man in John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy, when things go spectacularly wrong I tend to favor the screw-up theory.
So in rereading the first chapter of this book, I’m a little taken aback to see how urgently the need to recover an erased identity springs to the fore: “Does the word Sparta mean anything to you? . . . The word Sparta, what does that mean to you?” Indeed, Sparta’s search for her identity, her determination to recover her history and personal integrity, became the plot drivers of the entire series.
I remember calling up Byron and excitedly reading him passages from the first chapter over the phone. Her memory starts to come back! She makes a daring escape in a helicopter! He was bemused, I think, but he encouraged me to carry on. Perhaps he sensed that Sparta had become real to me, a lost soul possessed of immense potential— and that I had internalized her.
Having decided that Sparta was the victim of a conspiracy, I had to decide who was conspiring about what.
Again the answer came easily. What to do about the aliens is a question that figures in a number of Arthur’s works; he’s had fun at the expense of those who would try to manipulate hidden knowledge of alien visitation to their own ends (“Dave, this mission is just too important. . . .”).