Jor is quickly able to see that the saboteurs have blown a hole in the disk large enough to throw a skiff through.
He runs to the far end of the platform, which is still incomplete, with boards and slats instead of metal grilling. “Jor, be careful!” Abdera shouts.
He is not worried about falling. Although conflicted about the ultimate value of the Lens, Jor knows it is still his project, his life’s work; any attack on it is an attack on him.
Once he has completed his circuit and examined the gear joints of the steering mechanism, he relaxes so thoroughly that he laughs.
“How is this funny?” D’Yquem says, barely able to utter words, he is so out of breath.
“All they did was poke a hole in the disk,” Jor says. “We can fix that in a few days. If they’d really wanted to destroy the Lens, they should have put their bomb in the gears. That would not only take months to repair, it might have brought down the whole structure.”
Perhaps it is the residual effects of the brue. Or the climb. Jor shouts into the Venerian night, “Idiots! Tear your city down! Leave the Lens alone!”
He turns and sees Abdera staring at him with what can only be disgust.
Back at the base of the Lens, Jor, Abdera, and D’Yquem fall into a crowd of confused security types. D’Yquem goes off in search of information. Abdera and Jor stand by her skiff in the roiling hot mist, so thick now that Jor can barely see Abdera ten feet away.
“I’m sorry about what I said up there.” One lesson he has learned from his cruel father is, when necessary, be the first to apologize. (Because Miller Lennox never does.)
Among the many differences between Terrestrian and Venerian responses—they don’t shrug. If uncomfortable and unwilling to engage, they just stare.
And so Abdera stares. Jor cannot fail to notice that, even in the thick mist, which coats his skin and clothing, Abdera appears cool and dry. Her garments, standard for a Venerian female of her clan, are largely a series of varicolored wraps and scarves that bind her hair while not really covering her head. She wears sandals that could easily have been found on Earth.
There is no differentiation in garments by male and female, but rather by age and status: postfertile Venerians wear more structured clothing, prematable Venerians much less.
“I was angry,” Jor says. “Then I was overly elated because the Lens survived.”
Still she stares.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” he says, changing his tone and, hopefully, the whole conversation. “Why did you want to meet me tonight?”
Finally, he engages her. She takes a step toward Jor, actually touching his arm (a rare event in mixed public). “It is a painful admission—”
“Hey!” D’Yquem shouts as he suddenly appears out of the mist. “They caught them!”
“The bombers?” Jor says.
“They were still inside the compound, still carrying climbing tools and explosives.” He shakes his head at the unlikelihood. “They didn’t even try to get away.”
He holds up an image. Jor and Abdera see five Venerians, two males and three pregendered youths.
Abdera is clearly upset, turning away. Jor reaches for her, but she runs off, disappearing into the mist.
“Now what?” he says.
“Maybe she knows them,” D’Yquem says. “They’re from her clan.”
Jor has no contact with Abdera the next day. In a way, he’s glad: he has no idea what to say to her. And too much other work.
His first eight hours are consumed by plans for repairs to the Lens, and five times the usual Venus–Earth–Venus message traffic, all of it reducible to two phrases: “Venerian damage to Lens.” “Stay on schedule and punish the criminals!” (This last related with great sternness by Tuttle.)
“Amusing sidelight,” D’Yquem says, as Jor emerges from the conference room, having applied classic team motivation to his own department heads (“Work faster, you fuckers!”).
“Please share. Amusement is hard to find today.”
“Your miscreants were up to other mischief.”
“Such as?”
D’Yquem hands him a flimsy. “They, and some team of yet-to-be-identified accomplices, staged a raid on our garbage dump.”
Jor cannot understand this; D’Yquem is amused. He nods toward the message. “They removed giant heaps of metal slag, soiled mud, vegetative matter, and took it somewhere.”
“That was all?”
“They apparently failed to disturb anything mechanical, including what was left of my Mark III device.” That had been D’Yquem’s first attempt at bringing computational science to the Lens. The device had overheated and melted down. Mark IV had an improved cooling system.
“If they left your garbage alone, why do you care?”
“I don’t, especially.” He smiles. “I just happened to be lurking by your assistant’s desk when the message arrived.” Jor’s secretary is a middle-aged Norwegian woman named Marjatta (2,3,4), now married after a brief and unsatisfactory affair with Jor a decade past. She is capable, but easily distracted, especially by D’Yquem, who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time hovering near her desk.
“Strange—” Jor suspects a connection. The attack on the Lens is such an outrageous action by the Venerians that every aspect must have meaning. But the alcohol, stress, and short night have left him fuzzy.
“If I were you, I would ask Security to track the theft. See where the material ends up.”
“Don’t we have better things to do? I know that Security feels quite stretched at the moment.”
“If you want to know why the Venerians attacked, you’ll press this.” Then he smiled again. “Or you could just ask your girlfriend. You’re both rebels.”
Jor blushes at the memory. The #2 and #6 in his Exile Quotient—as D’Yquem knows—are the result of a romance Jor had at college with a young woman from Sub-Africa.
Any sort of relationship, even a nonromantic one, would have made Jor and Njeri notorious … the fact that Jor’s father was Miller Lennox, one of the most powerful business and religious figures in Illinois, made the couple into outright targets. And not just to the public … it was Miller Lennox who arranged for Njeri to be shipped home in disgrace—
And for Jor to join the ranks of exiled Terrestrians on Venus.
Where, if D’Yquem’s analysis is correct, he resumed his old ways … becoming involved with an inappropriate partner. In self-defense, Jor would note that he lived at Venus Port for a decade during which he was involved with three human females, including Marjatta. His liaison with Abdera only began when she became the primary contact for the Lens team and her clan, which had some ancient rights to the air above the plot of marsh where the Lens was built.
It had happened quickly—from first handshake to intimacy, no more than a day, which was unprecedented in Jor’s prior relationships. And, he later learned, in the Venerian equivalent.
One night in 13-Plus, Jor had dared to ask D’Yquem, “What do you think she sees in me?”
D’Yquem snickered. “Money and power.”
“Besides that.”
“Well, maybe it’s because you look like a fucking Venerian male.”
Jor knows that his complexion is darker than many of his fellow Terrestrians—not the handful from Africa, of course. He is taller than most, thinner, too.
But what D’Yquem almost certainly means is his face: all of the men in the Lennox family have prominent noses and close-set eyes. “We look like the business end of hatchets,” Jor’s older brother Karl once told him.
Of course, Jor also knows that physical resemblance, while key in initiating personal relationships, is not enough to sustain one. Especially a relationship that crosses social and biological and clannish lines.