Now humans rode Gaijin flower-ships to Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Where the Gaijin granted access, an explosion of data resulted, and human understanding advanced quickly. But the Gaijin were very obviously in control, and that caused a lot of frustration among the scientific community. The scientists wanted to see it all, not just what the Gaijin chose to present.
And there were major gaps in the Gaijin’s gift. Notably, Venus. There hadn’t been a single Gaijin-hosted human visit to Venus — although it was obvious, from telescopic sightings of flower-ship activity, that this was a major observation site for the Gaijin.
Not too many people cared about such things. To spend one’s entire life laboring in some obscure corner of science when it was obvious that the Gaijin already had so much more knowledge was dispiriting. Carole herself hadn’t followed in her mother’s footsteps. She had gone instead into theology, one of the many broadly philosophical boom areas of academic discipline. And her mother had gone to her grave unfulfilled, leaving Carole with a burden of obscure guilt.
The truth was, to Carole, these issues — the decline of science, the obscure activities and ambitions of the Gaijin — were dusty, the concerns of another century, of vanished generations. This was 2081: sixty years after Nemoto’s discovery of the Gaijin. To Carole, as she had grown up, the Gaijin were here; they had always been here, they always would be here. And so she had put aside her guilt, as much as any child can about her mother.
Until Nemoto had come along.
Nemoto: herself a weird historic relic, riven by barely comprehensible obsessions, huddled on the Moon, nursing her fragile body with a suite of ever-more-exotic antiaging technologies. Nemoto continually railed against the complacency of governments and other bodies regarding the Gaijin and their activities. “We have no sense of history,” she would say. “We have outlived our shock at the discovery of the Gaijin. We do not see trends. Perhaps the Gaijin rely on our mayfly life span to wear away our skepticism. But those of us who remember a time before the Gaijin know that this is not right… ”
And Nemoto was worried about Venus.
One thing that was well known about the Gaijin was that their favored theater of operations was out in the dark, among the asteroids or the stately orbits of the giant planets, or in the deeper cold of the comet clouds even farther out. They didn’t appear to relish the Solar System inward of Earth’s orbit, crammed with dust and looping rogue asteroids, drenched by the heat and light of a too-close Sun, a place where the gravity well was so deep that a ship had to expend huge amounts of energy on even the simplest maneuver.
So why were the Gaijin so drawn to Venus?
Nemoto had begun to acquire funding, from a range of shadowy sources, to initiate a variety of projects: all more or less anti-Gaijin — including this one.
And that was why the first human astronaut to Venus was under Nemoto’s control: not attached to a Gaijin flower-ship, but riding in a clunky and crude human-built spacecraft, little advanced from Apollo 13 as far as Carole could tell: a ship that had been fired into space from a great electromagnetic cargo launcher on the Moon.
The Gaijin could have stopped her, Carole supposed. But, though they had shadowed her all the way here, they had shown no inclination to oppose her directly. Perhaps that would come later.
Or perhaps, to the Gaijin, Carole and her fragile ship simply didn’t matter.
She was surrounded by blackness, the only lights the telltales in her helmet and on her chest panel. The aperture above her was a star field framed by the open doorway.
Nemoto, time-delayed, began to speculate about the vapors that had been trapped by the translucent sheet. “A good deal of sulphuric acid,” she said. “Other compounds… some clay particles… a little free oxygen! How strange…”
On her belt Carole carried a couple of miniaturized floods. She lit them now. Elliptical patches of light splashed on the walls of the chamber, which curved around her. She glimpsed an uneven, smoothly textured inner surface, some kind of structure spanning the interior.
She reported to Nemoto. “The moonlet is hollowed out. The chamber is roughly spherical, though the walls are not smooth. This single chamber must take up most of the volume of the moonlet. The walls can’t be much more than a few meters thick anywhere…” She aimed her beams at the center of the cavern. There was a dark mass there, about the size of a small car. It was fixed in place by a series of poles that jutted out radially, like the spokes of a wheel, to the wall of the chamber, fixing themselves to the moonlet’s equator. The spokes looked as if they were made from rock. Perhaps they had just been left in place when the chamber had been carved out.
She described all this without speculating about the purpose of the structures. Then she blipped her thruster pack and drifted to the wall.
The wall looked carved. She saw basins, valleys, little mountains and ridges, all on the scale of meters. It was like flying over a miniaturized landscape at some theme park.
“…The central structure is obviously a power source,” Nemoto was saying. “There is deuterium in there. Fusion, perhaps. A miniature Sun, suspended at the center of this hollow world. And from the topography of that inner surface it seems that the moonlet’s basins and valleys have been carved to take a liquid. Water? A miniature Sun, model rivers and seas — or at least, lakes. Perhaps the moonlet was spun up to provide artificial gravity… This is a bubble world, Carole, designed to support some form of life, independent of the outside universe.”
“But that makes no sense,” Carole replied. “We’re orbiting Venus. There’s a gigantic Sun just the other side of that wall, pumping out all the energy anybody could require. Why would anybody hide away in this… cave?”
But Nemoto, time-delayed, kept talking, of course, oblivious to her questions.
Carole stopped a meter or so short of the wall. She deployed her portable lab, letting its laser shine on the wall.
She stroked the wall’s surface. The texture was nothing like the lunar-surface rock and regolith of the moonlet’s exterior. Instead there seemed to be an underlay of crystalline substances that glinted and sparkled — quartz perhaps. Here and there, clinging to the crystalline substrate, she found a muddy clay. Though the “mud” was dried out in the vacuum, she saw swirls of color, complex compounds mixed in with the basic material. It reminded her of the gloopy mud of a volcanic hot spring.
The first results of her lab’s analysis began to chatter across its surface. Quartz, yes, and corundum — aluminum oxide. And everywhere, especially in those clay traces, she found traces of sulphuric acid.
Nemoto understood immediately.
“…Sulphuric acid. Of course. That is the key. What if these artificial lakes and rivers were once filled with acid? An acid biosphere is not as unlikely as it sounds. Sulphuric acid stays liquid over a temperature range three times that of water. Of course the acids dissolve most organic compounds — have you ever seen a sugar cube dropped in acid? But alkanes — simple straight-chain hydrocarbons — can survive. Or perhaps there is a biochemistry based on silicones, long-chain molecules based on silicon-oxygen pairs… Only a few common minerals can resist an acidic environment: quartz, corundum, a few sulphates. These walls have been weathered. Your mother would have understood… Venus is full of acid, you see. The clouds are filled with floating droplets of it. This is a good place to be, if what you need is acid…”
Carole gazed into the empty lake basins and tried to imagine creatures whose veins ran with acid. But this toy world, Nemoto had said, was hundreds of millions of years old. If any of their descendants survived they must be utterly transformed by time, she thought, as different from those who built this moonlet as I am from my mindless Mesozoic ancestors.