2312

He made many drives alone, and the AIs on board the squat rovers were simple indeed. The translator glasses were turning out to be much like a dog, attentive but predictable. He had never liked dogs, but in the struggle to understand his situation, he had to like this one.

In Cleopatra, after his meetings with Kexue, he would go out in search of the loudest bars he could find. Down one alley he heard English being sung, an entire group singing “The Ballad of John Reed,” and he almost ran down the street to make sure they would not somehow disappear. But it turned out to be just a song bar, with lots of bad beer and bad jokes and only a few people who spoke English. He met a woman there nevertheless, Zaofan (Rise in Rebellion), and went with her back to her room, and when they resurfaced from their dive into sex, back to the world of speech, and began to talk in the darkness before the city dome’s artificial dawn, she mentioned that she too worked for Lakshmi. Kiran felt a quick pulse of fear-it seemed more than a coincidence. He asked her some questions, very cautiously, and after a while her stories made it seem like half the people in Cleopatra worked for Lakshmi, so possibly their meeting had been a coincidence after all. Which would be nice; he didn’t want to be involved in any plots he didn’t understand. On the other hand, he did want to be involved in plots that he did understand. That would represent progress. So he began to hang out at the song bar, and between his spectacles and the people there who spoke some English, and once or twice some Telugu, he talked to a lot of people. He would sit between a Uighur and a Vietnamese and they would be using English to communicate with each other, their English mangled to the point of poetry, but comprehensible. He would bless the British and American empires and soak in every phrase.

He stuck by his friend Zaofan when he could find her, and from her and her unit found out more about Lakshmi. Lakshmi was one of the Working Group, everyone agreed. She didn’t like Shukra; she didn’t like China. In fact no one knew of anything she liked. There were rumors that in Indian mythology, Lakshmi was an avatar of Kali the death goddess-or maybe it was vice versa-no one knew for sure. Their Lakshmi was said to be hermaphroditic, and went through lovers like a black widow. You did not want to have her attention fixed on you. She had lived all over Venus in her youth, and some said ran a Beijing protection racket during her sabbaticals, under the nom de guerre Zhandhou (Do Battle). Shukra was in big trouble-“He’ll be sanwu before it’s all over, you’ll see. Or maybe 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.