“There are ways,” Jor says, knowing of one experimental method—
“Am I interrupting?” D’Yquem is returning to his chair.
“A moment of speculation,” Abdera said, her mood suddenly solemn. Jor notices that her flowing sarilike garment is torn near her left elbow.
He is beginning to form a question when the building shakes, a violent jolt that breaks glass at the bar and triggers shouts of alarm.
“What in God’s name was that?” D’Yquem says.
“The Lens!” Petros calls.
Crunching on broken glass, Jor rushes toward the bar and its big view window—
The evening is still unusually clear, and it makes the sight all the more horrific: there is a hole in the big dish of the Lens.
By the time Jor, Abdera, and D’Yquem emerge from the ground floor of the 13-Plus tower, the situation at the Lens is more troubling: the evening marine layer has rolled in, obscuring the ground view of the top of the structure—except for flashes of light, which mean additional explosions. (Any flashes of light are anomalies.) Jor cannot hear explosions, of course. The dense, rolling fog damps distant sound. Nor can he feel the ground shaking, but that could be due to the mud.
Even after years on Venus, he has never gotten used to the fact that the evening mist is hot, not cold as it would have been in an Earthly port city.
It takes far too much time to reach the Lens. TA has always skimped on rescue equipment, naturally, preferring to reserve precious cargo volume on spaceships for prefabricated construction materials, not fire or rescue trucks.
So Abdera, D’Yquem, and Jor are forced to travel in a Venerian skiff, which means letting Abdera serve as pilot. Terrestrians have never learned to operate the raftlike machines, especially since—owing to the lack of Venerian mass production—none is like another.
It makes D’Yquem unhappy. “Don’t we have more important things to worry about?” Jor says.
“We can fix the fucking Lens,” he snaps. “When you lose social status, you lose everything.” It is one of those passing remarks that makes Jor realize that D’Yquem’s pre-Venereal life must have been far different from his own.
Grumbling and petty, he climbs aboard nonetheless, and the trio commences a glide toward the smoking, flashing Lens at a speed they could easily exceed by walking.
Not that walking is possible. Venus Port is built on a delta. Instead of real streets, it has shallow rivulets and streams—more water than land.
And on most open land, and all “streets” and even on water near the shores, lay piles of newly raw material awaiting shipment via skiff.
Venus Port is being taken apart. According to Abdera, the process, known by the Venerian world as “reloquere”—has been going on for the equivalent of two hundred Earth years. The first human explorers originally thought that the open pits and half-built buildings were signs of construction.
It was quite the other way around. They were what remained of residence towers and palaces and businesses and manufacturing facilities and libraries—whatever one would find in a city.
Reloquere is the prelude, Venerians say, to the great Sunset of Time, that moment each ten thousand or hundred thousand or one million (accounts vary, depending on which Venerian clan is asked) years when the clouds fade … the Sun is clearly visible.
And it sets as Venus creaks into a partial rotation, unleashing storms, floods, quakes.
Remaking the landscape. Where once was Twi-Land would now be Noon, or Nightside.
Or so the legend has it. Most Terrestrians dismiss the idea, either for lack of scientific backing or their own theological reasons. But the Venerians seem convinced: wars between the city-states have ceased in the past few years as reloquere spread throughout the Twilight Lands.
So, even as the Terrestrian Authority raises the Lens to the heavens, the Venerians continue to disassemble their city brick by vine.
The process isn’t just a disassembly of structures … the individual elements of each structure are taken apart, too. Bricks are taken to a place to the north and east, where there is almost no dry land, and dissolved … returned to the mud whence they came.
Piping is melted down and returned to more solid ground. (TA’s long-ago offer to buy this metal was rejected so thoroughly, Jor knows, that a second request was never made.) Glass, the same—transformed back to sand and spread on the shore.
Even the wiring of the Venerians’ electronic grid has to be stripped out of structures, coiled, then melted down.
This strikes Jor as simply foolish: art and decorative items are also on the list. Venerians have statues though most are abstract rather than representational, and these are also victims of reloquere. Not long ago he happened to see the removal and disassembly of one obelisk from his Lens station over a tenday, and he was impressed with the care and even ceremony, like a state funeral.
Nevertheless, at the end of it a thirty-foot-tall piece of art had been reduced to a cooling vat of creamy goo.
He later asked Abdera how the artists felt about the death of their work, only to be told, “They are long gone.” Which, given the Venerian life span, suggested that the artists had completed their work centuries ago … or something more sinister.
The Venerians also have great gardens filled with broad-leafed ferns and purple Twi-Land flowers with blossoms as big as a human head, so richly fragrant that spending too much time too close might result in suffocation. (For a human, that is: the Venerians thrive when surrounded by Twi-Land’s blooms.)
What this means is that Jor’s skiff is forced to avoid the “streets,” since these are crowded with materials-to-be-shipped, in addition to Venerians now living in tents. There are also a few humans, stirred from their towers by the disturbance at the Lens.
It takes them an hour to cover a distance of less than five miles. Jor cannot speak to Abdera; she certainly does not turn and communicate with him or D’Yquem. Nor do Jor and D’Yquem have anything to say.
They finally reach the base of the Lens and are allowed inside the perimeter. “Someone tunneled under the fence on the Venerian side,” one of the security team, Hollander (2,4,7) tells Jor, who does not bother to correct the man: everything outside the fence is the Venerian “side.”
“Crawled up the Lens without using the lift or the backup ladder—”
“—Which explains why no one saw this,” Jor snaps. There are observers, and even cameras, watching the gridlike tower, not for saboteurs, of course, but for damage … stray vines.
Hollander flinches, anticipating punishment. “They attached an explosive with a timer, then crawled back to the ground to watch what happened.”
Jor has other orders to give Hollander, but there is a disturbance at the base of the Lens. Security wants to arrest Abdera.
“She’s with me, you idiots,” Jor snaps. There are three security shifts; the first two would know that Abdera and Jor are involved. The late shift, apparently not.
Then there is a problem with the lift: a security team has taken it to the top and won’t let it return.
So Jor begins to climb up the girder itself. If the Venerian bombers can do it—
Physical exertion is not advised for Terrestrians, especially those soggy with brue. But Jor is determined to see what happened to his Lens.
D’Yquem and Abdera follow though more slowly.
The Lens reminds most Terrestrians of the Eiffel Tower. The two structures share a common shape though the Lens is slightly shorter (850 feet as opposed to over a thousand) and is topped by a rotating silvery disk that is itself 250 feet in diameter, and represents the greater engineering challenge. It is designed to gather, then focus, megahigh-frequency transmissions from the giant orbital Equatorial dish, opening a portal between Earth and the second planet.
Jor is aching, puffing, sweating heavily as he reaches the platform level. Pausing for breath, he takes in the view, the evening mist blanketing Venus Port as he hears Abdera and D’Yquem from below … the aural dampening effect of the fog making them seem closer than they are, as if all of them were in the cozy interior of 13-Plus, not hanging off the side of a tower.