Exile (23 page)

Thus, perhaps, Wrath-Pei's interest in it.

"Hello!" Wrath-Pei's torpidly cheerful voice called. At first she could not locate it. She stood at the midpoint of five branching rooms, a Martian architectural style; all were filed with abundant and cleverly hidden artificial light and more booty—including, in one, massive pieces of Titanian furniture, finer even than that in the palace.

Queen Clan was clutched with anger and felt now that perhaps Tarn's method of disposal wasn't so extreme, after all.

"Please! Come in!" Wrath-Pei's voice called again. Now the queen caught sight of the hovering chair and its occupant. It resided in none of the five rooms but beyond one of them: an enclosed patio which led to an open area even more brightly lit than the indoor rooms.

Kamath Clan made her way through the patio, noting more antiques and treasured pieces: a painting by Carvan-Shay, a Titan landscape long reported stolen from a nearby gallery.

The queen passed through an open archway into brilliant light resembling that of Earth's Sun. For a moment her memories came flooding back: the fields under brilliant blue sky, the warmth like toast on her skin....

But the artificial sky in this domed room was pink and the light not quite as bright as she thought,
more Martian than Earth, but still blinding, by Titanian standards.

"Sit down! Join me!" Wrath-Pei offered.

His chair floated over an artificial pool of water—one of the largest such amusements the queen had seen on all of Titan. The pool, shaped like a human kidney, was illuminated by hidden lights which brightened the pink dome with reflected light and played on the gently lapping blue of the waves.

The image of Wrath-Pei's chair hanging still over moving water was unsettling.

"Do you like what I've done with the place?" Wrath-Pei asked.

"I've never been here," the queen answered.

"No? I wish you had; you wouldn't recognize old Tarn's hovel." He gave a slight wince. "It looked like a barracks before I took it over."

"So all the furnishings are yours?"

"Of course! Some of these pieces looked lost in my ship. But here . . ." Wrath-Pei gazed around lovingly.

So Tarn had been guilty of nothing but being in the way, after all.

"Would you enjoy something to drink?" Wrath-Pei asked, and it was now that the queen caught sight of the nearly invisible Lawrence, standing still in one corner of the pool room, like a potted plant. There was something vaguely vegetablelike about him, his stunted limbs like short roots, his black clothing, the short-toed boots unmoving, perhaps seeking to suck up the rogue droplets of water splashed onto the nearby tile from the pool.

Wrath-Pei was still waggling his own glass, which held a bright red liquid. (Blood? No ...

"No, thank you."

"Perhaps, you'd enjoy something else? A... ministration from . . . Quog?"

At the potioner's name, Kamath Clan went cold inside, and Wrath-Pei smiled over his cocktail.

"Don't worry, my queen. It will be our little secret. Am I correct in guessing that you've just given your daughter-in-law and your son their initiation into that particular fraternity?"

How does he know? How could he know?
Queen Clan found herself saying, "Yes."

"Ah. Then they should be much easier to manage. Old Quog is an interesting fellow, is he not?"

"You've visited him?" the queen said, almost in horror.

Wrath-Pei's smile widened. "Only ... in the line of duty. I followed you there this morning. An interesting follow, as I say. But old, very old. I hope he isn't near death?"

The queen fought panic. "He is . . . not well."

"A pity. But we must do what we can for him."

"Yes . . ."

"Good. Now, what was it you wanted to discuss with me?" The incremental smile widened another notch.

"I .. ." Fighting the clutch of anxiety in her throat, Kamath Clan forced herself back to rigid control. There was a way to handle this—there was always a way.

"I wanted your thoughts on what Prime Comehan's intentions are."

"His intentions toward Titan?" Still Wrath-Pei's smile had not left.

"Yes."

"He intends to have it."

A blink was the queen's only show of surprise.

Wrath-Pei continued, in a slightly more serious tone, "Oh, surely, he means to have it all. Earth, Mars, Venus, Titan, Pluto. All of the worlds. But as for Titan—not yet."

"We are safe?"

"For now, yes. His immediate goal is Venus. That, of course, is the true prize. And before long he will possess it. But Cornehian having a prize and keeping it are two different things. The Bug will never feel safe—or content—until all the worlds are in his orbit."

"Is there nothing we can do?"

"Hmmm?" Wrath-Pei looked as if he had been distracted from his thoughts. "Oh, yes," he said, still distracted, "there is much we can, and will, do. Cornehian will find that the rose that is Titan has a very long thorn. I was just thinking . . ."

"Then you have no intention of forming an alliance."

"What? Of course not! My only alliance is with
you,
my queen. But perhaps a ... nonaggression pact, for the moment. They are useful. By now, Cornelian knows that he will have to contend with us sooner or later. Later will serve his purpose, as well as ours. We are quite safe from his tinkering, for the moment. But. . ." Again Wrath-Pei was preoccupied.

"Is there something else on your mind?"

Slowly, Wrath-Pei turned his gaze back to the queen. His smile had returned, widening. With barely a flick of one finger in Lawrence's direction, the hovering chair moved over the water toward Ka-math Clan. The queen looked at Lawrence; the boy had not moved a muscle, but there had been a flit of red light across his visored face.

Wrath-Pei's chair stopped a precise meter from Kamath Clan. The two were face-to-face, WrathPei's smile locked in place as he lowered his drink to a holder, which ratcheted out from the chair's base, above the holster where the ever-present clippers reposed.

Wrath-Pei leaned slightly forward, arms resting on his knees. His sculpted face and lionine hair framed his beautiful eyes, which stared intently into the queen's own.

"I was thinking of our own alliance."

The queen, completely humorless in such matters, and who had been contemplating a similar gesture, said, "That was the other matter I came to speak with you about."

"Ah . . ." Wrath-Pei said.

Kamath Clan strode forward and lay her thick hands on Wrath-Pei's knees. The chair rocked slightly down, its gyros whinning, bringing it instantly back to level.

Kamath Clan looked into Wrath-Pei's amused eyes.

The queen said, "It has been some time since I took a mate—but I have not forgotten."

With a smooth motion she began to undo the fasteners of Wrath-Pei's lower garment; her eyes never leaving Wrath-Pei's smiling face.

Her wrist was caught in Wrath-Pci's viselike fingers, which held it fast.

"I was thinking," Wrath-Pei said, his voice filled with the same constant amusement as his eyes, "more along the lines of what I asked you earlier. About your son."

"I
t doesn't make sense."

From his outpost set into the side of Sacajawea Patera, in what had been planned as a tourist haven with one of the most stunning views on all of Venus but which now served as a command center for what had so far been a phantom war, Targon Ramir tried once more to make sense of a senseless situation.

He felt helpless, and almost foolish. Actually, more than anything, he felt that he didn't belong here. Not only was he not a military leader—but he felt divorced from his area of true usefulness. Back in Tellus Station, he was an engineer with his hands on the controls. Here, he was a tourist with a pair of binoculars, playing war.

He had to admit that Jean Sneaden had been right to choose this place for reconnaissance. If the Martian attack came—if—then this was the place on Venus to monitor the situation. The Sacajawea Center was nothing more than a giant room with a view. But what a view. Like an eagle's nest, the center, known appropriately as the Piton, jutted outward nearly a hundred feet and was tapped into the extinct volcano only four hundred feet down from the summit. The effect was like hanging in midair. One actually had to crane one's neck to catch any glimpse of the peak itself—there were other stations on the patera for mountain sightseeing—and if one had any sense of vertigo at all, it would emerge here. Large sections of the floor were of quartz glass, giving an unrestricted view of the floor of the patera, a rocky glaze of sparse vegetation, and a lazy ribbon of blue river, seven thousand feet below. Now and again a crane would glide by, below one's feet and above a thin finger of cloud.

And the view to either side, and straight ahead, was more than magnificent. A mostly clear horizon dotted with paradise in the making. There was no other place on Venus where so much of the progress that had been made could be seen at once. Lake Clotho Tessera, the widest waterway as yet, was a blue glint to the east; at its shores was the budding community of Lakshmi Planum, where a few hun- dred early colonists augmented a worker's colony which would someday blossom to tens of thousands. Even now, in the midst of crisis, some defiant soul was plying the shoreline in a sailboat, its bright red sail a promise of possible summers to come.

It was when looking at things like this that Targon Ramir most understood Carter Frolich's descent into madness. To think that all this could be pushed back a hundred years, two hundred years.

Other communities were spread like benevolent rashes in the middle distance; and close by, almost in the shadow of the volcano, stood Frolich, larger even than Tellus Station, whose citizens had insisted on the name over Carter's violent objections. It was destined to be the planet's largest city, a true metropolis, and already was the center of finance and trade on Venus, as well as the home of a dozen transplanted industries from Earth and as many more from Mars.

With his binoculars, Targon traced the empty streets, the abandoned construction sights; a swirl of dust resolved itself in the instrument's autofocus into a lone little girl, gliding back and forth on a swing set in her flat backyard, empty beside its new house save for a single tree and the toy itself. Back and forth.

She looked so lonely.

Targon moved the binoculars to the perimeter of Frolich and studied the near battalion of security forces and batteries of raser cannon, their thin barrels like a row of ancient cigarettes, pointed at the blue sky.

Pointed at what?

What war?

This was what disturbed Targon most—not knowing. Though he could give a signal from the room behind him and destroy every feeder station on the planet, he had no idea if and when—or why—he would have to give that order. The fact that there was only one feeder station visible to him—and that one far off, at the base of another volcano, Sif Mons—made him nervous, but he knew well enough that if he gave the command, the sky would instantly be filled with the brown ugly stains of their destruction. There were no more personnel near any of the stations, and even Tellus itself had been abandoned save for a skeleton crew to monitor the system. They would be safe from the initial blast in their underground bunker—though they would have to abandon the site within a day to avoid residual exposure.

But why would he have to give that order?

The fact was, there were no Martian troops in orbit around Venus. No Martian Marine transports had popped into nearby space, and all intelligence indicated that there were no troops en route. In fact, the most maddening bit of espionage, both electronic and human, that resided in Targon Ramjr's Screen indicated with certainty that the Martian Marines on their home planet were currently at stand-down, and many of them were on furlough.

This was insane

And yet Venus had now been ringed by the Martians with a string of flat metal satellites: too thin to hold troops; too restricted to hold full-scale plasma weapons, which would not get through Venus' shields, anyway; too large to hold raser cannon, which would be ineffective from that orbit.

What was Prime Cornelian up to?

And nothing Targon Ramir's own advisers had been able to come up with was of any help. Were the satellites communications blackeners, old nuclear weapons set to go off simultaneously and form an electromagnetic blanket around the planet, destroying communications? Was this just the first step in Cornelian's invasion? In any event, all defensive units had been given individual instructions in the event of some such an occurrence. But there were no radiation sensor readings from the flat packages, and while it made some sense for Cornelian to destroy Venusian communications, it made not very much, since Cornelian would then hamper his own communications on landing.

Were they decoys? Some sort of new weapon?

That was what made Targon go cold and why all the feeder stations had been kept on highest alert since the first flat box had zipped into orbit five days before. That and the fact that apparently Prime Cornelian himself was in orbit along with the orbiters, while all his troops stayed back on Mars, playing cards and on drinking binges.