even four withouts, if she castrates him too!”
Apparently Lakshmi had wanted to eject Venus’s frozen carbon dioxide at an angle into space, a process that over time would have speeded up Venus’s rotation and made for a natural day. That plan had been turned down in favor of the big sequestration, but as she was such a power in the Working Group, there was always the possibility that the policy might someday change. Who knew? The Working Group was a tight secretive little club, prone to fits of enthusiasm and sudden faction. Most of the people in the song bar felt it was a dangerous force, not at all interested in ordinary Venusians except insofar as they were useful to the terraforming. In other words, same old China! China 2.0! Chinaworld! The Middle Kingdom Relocated Closer to Sun! Therefore the Inner Kingdom! They had a lot of names for it.
Some in the bar said all this was an exaggeration and a cliche. Here they were in the song bar, after all, and out there doing great things every day, therefore part of the story of Venus, no matter what people said about government-but much laughter and shouted scorn greeted these sentiments. Obviously most in the bar felt they were only helpless observers of a giant drama going on above their heads, a drama that was eventually going to suck them down into its maelstrom, no matter what they said or wanted. Better therefore to drink and talk and sing and dance until they were stupid with exhaustion and ready for a stagger through the early-morning streets, Kiran following Zaofan to her slot on the matrazenlager of her work unit. After a few repetitions of this Kiran was accepted as part of her work unit’s lodge, which was nice.
One time he was coming back into Colette when it seemed to him that someone was watching him, and when he noticed this, the person began to close on him. A big man, and his quick glance revealed to Kiran the existence of another person behind Kiran. Immediately Kiran bolted into one of the jammed alleyways and jinked through the back of an open-front shop, causing an uproar that he hoped would delay the people following him. After that it was a matter of dashing as hard as he could, deeper and deeper into the maze of circular alleys that made up Colette’s downtown. Zigzagging often, he hurried to Lakshmi’s little Colette office and drew himself up before the security person at the front desk with aplomb. “Here to see Lakshmi,” he huffed. The security person’s eyebrows shot up his forehead and instantly there was a gun pointing at Kiran’s face.
It took a while for Lakshmi to get over to Colette, and in that time the guards didn’t want him to leave the office. It was pretty much like being under arrest, but when Lakshmi arrived, she seemed pleased with his escape.
“There’s a closed building under the rim at 123 in Cleopatra,” she said when he was done with his story. “Move to Cleopatra, stay with your friend there, and just float for a while. See if you can figure out how many people go in and out of that building per day. I think Shukra’s trying to set up a xiaojinku in my town.”
“Does that work like a hawala?” Kiran asked.
Lakshmi did not acknowledge that he had spoken. She left and then Kiran was free to go.
So the next time he was in Cleopatra, Kiran floated. He went across the city into the 110 district, where the radial boulevards were less frequent and the buildings often industrial in size and purpose. The bars were correspondingly bigger as well. He went into one near the 123 facility and sat near the slot where the bartender gave drinks to the waiters. He turned on his translation glasses and stared forward like he was watching something on them, slurping bad beer and reading the translation of the voices around him.
They’re too beautiful, it’s a mistake.
Lakshmi wanted them that way.
Shhh! She who must not be named!
But Kiran could hear them laughing. The glasses did not print out in red Ha Ha Ha! as in a comic book; he wished they would.
After an evening of listening to bar patrons he stood around for a while in the street, took a cable car up to the rim promenade, and walked above the neighborhood in question, looking down casually. He had his spectacles record the conversations going on around him. Later that night, back down near the city center, he sat in a corner table of a bar and played verbal translations of what he had recorded, hoping he had caught some security people talking. “She has to stop this, it’s too much.” But another one was not happy to hear this: “We work for Big Pears, just do it.”
Kiran kept replaying the spectacles’ recordings and translations, trying to get the hang of the Chinese tones as well as ponder the sense of the scraps of talk. There was “a man from Shanghai,” it seemed. Nanren husheng. This seemed to be a man of importance. Shanghai was inundated, he thought. Maybe it was another code phrase. There was a song in the song bar: “My home was in Shanghai-now it’s underwater-I came to Venus because I did not want to live with the fishes-but now here I am, and it’s wetter than the bottom of the sea-and full of sharks! Goodness gracious!”
The word “they,” tamen, seemed to refer to the Working Group, or some other powerful force behind the scenes. “They” want this, “they” will do that. The Working Group was definitely opaque from below. It was either elected or appointed; no one knew which. There were supposedly about fifty people in it. Some people said it was like the tongs back home, others that they had found their method in the pre-Han ways, or even from the lost Iroquois League of North America.
Zaofan and her unit were full of more stories, told in snatches when out in the streets. Lakshmi was working with others, including Vishnu (naturally), also a Rama and a Krishna. Taking an Indian name was compared to cutting off your queue during the Qing dynasty. So if the people doing this were in the Working Group, what did that say about Venus-China relations? No one was quite sure.
Vishnu and Rama appeared only at meetings held at the Cleopatra spaceport, so possibly they came from off-planet or were traveling a lot. Krishna lived on Venus, but in Nabuzana, a canyon city on Aphrodite. Once Kiran was called into Lakshmi’s room when Krishna was visiting her, or so Zaofan told him later when he described the visitor, who had not been introduced or said a word.
Shukra’s new building at Cleopatra 123 (if that was what it was) was tightly secured, with a small population living in it full-time, judging by food shipments in and recycling shipments out. Kiran spent a fair amount of time in the neighborhood, wandering around watching the place, sometimes from the rim promenade. Lakshmi’s people also had several closed buildings in Cleopatra, Kiran was learning, so perhaps she felt that Shukra was horning in on her territory by doing the same.
Then one day he went back to Zaofan’s lodge in Cleopatra and found their section of the matrazenlager was occupied by an entirely different group of people. Zaofan was gone, Strength of Nation, Great Leap-all the little group that had taken him in. The lodge manager said they had left together after getting a call from somewhere on Aphrodite. The manager shrugged. This was the way on Venus, the shrug said. People got their working orders and moved as a unit. If you weren’t part of the unit, it wasn’t any of your affair; you were xuan, left hanging.
“No!” Kiran cried aloud. “Zaofan!” He had laughed with these people, he had said their names in English and they would laugh!
The new crowd on the matrazenlager turned their backs to him until he was ready to talk.
After that they introduced themselves, and as he could tell them where the good bars in the neighborhood were and things like that, they folded him into their crowd in much the same way the earlier one had. Still he felt changed, and was reserved with these people as he had not been with the first group-or really they had been the second, now that he thought about it. It was going to keep happening, he could see. You could only give yourself so many times.
The lodge manager, with whom he had become friendly, saw that in him. “Don’t think that way or you cut yourself off! You can give yourself as many times as there are chances to give. It’s not something that runs out.”
“It hurts too much when people go.”
The manager shrugged. “Attachment is fruitless. Release and move on. Your cuo is your suo.”
Your place is your-place. A lodge keeper’s philosophy. But every building on Venus was a lodge. Or every building in the solar system.
Meanwhile this new group had some people in it who also worked for Lakshmi, down at the new seacoast being built in the south. They were building cities in advance of the ocean, which was still falling every day as snow. Sea level was going to be a high-stakes game for years to come, with any number of players involved. There was even a futures market of sorts devoted to it, in that you could place bets on the height sea level would ultimately attain. The range being bet on was apparently pretty wide-over two vertical kilometers, which horizontally meant huge stretches of land. Deals in the Working Group or even back in China were apparently being made, broken,
