Free Child of Venus by Pamela Sargent Page A

covered with graffiti written in Arabic and Anglaic, following the gentle upward slope at the end of the tunnel into the main dome.
    She boarded the first passenger cart that rolled past, heedless of where she was headed until the entrance to the airship bay was in sight. The entrance, twenty meters wide and thirty meters high, was open, revealing two cranes and groups of workers hovering over consoles. Clusters of tents for new settlers sat in the small grassy space outside the bay. Oberg’s main dome was more crowded than any of the other three, with large buildings that held laboratories in addition to the houses that nestled near the wooded park areas. There were so many houses on the flat land that stretched to the External Operations Center that Mahala could barely glimpse the distant lighted windows of the large three-story building.
    The cart rolled to a stop to let off passengers near the new community greenhouse; a gray-haired woman lingered near Mahala. “Excuse me, child,” the woman said. “You look distressed. Is there anything I can do?”
    â€œNo. I’m fine.”
    â€œI take this way home all the time, and I don’t think I’ve seen you
before. Shouldn’t you be—”
    â€œI’m all right,” Mahala said.
    The woman climbed down from the cart. People outside the tents were kneeling on prayer rugs; others moved toward the large, walled-in courtyard that served as Oberg’s mosque as the call to prayer sounded from the mosque’s minaret.
    She was alone. Oberg’s night, its darktime, had come; a disk of silvery light glowed far overhead. Mahala had always felt secure inside Oberg’s domes, protected from the dangers of the planet’s surface. Now she felt trapped, unable to escape the past.
    You shouldn’t be alive, Lakshmi had told her. It was all very clear now, the whispers, the silences, the secrets that had been kept. Ishtar’s followers had made prisoners of many, even of Dyami, but Mahala had always believed that her mother must have been misled by those around her, that she had not known what some of her followers were doing. Maybe that was just another lie. No wonder Dyami had never moved back to Oberg, even though Mahala knew that Risa and Sef wanted him there. He probably saw her the same way Lakshmi did, as part of everything he wanted to forget.
    Mahala stood up; the cart halted to let her off. She was near a grove of slender trees; in the shadows, she could make out the memorial pillars that honored Oberg’s dead. Several globes of light had been set in the nearby trees to illuminate the area; two mourners knelt near one pillar to lay down a wreath. She did not want to go there, where a holo image of her mother’s beautiful face gazed out from the top of one pillar. There was no image of Boaz. There was no memorial to him because he had not wanted one; Risa had told her that lie, too. Now she was certain that no one had wanted her father, the traitor, commemorated.
    She hurried through the trees until she came to the monument honoring her great-grandmother, then froze. A man nearly as tall and broad-shouldered as Sef stood there, a duffel at his feet. He turned his head; before she could conceal herself, he had seen her.
    â€œMahala! It is you, isn’t it?”
    The light from one of the lanterns hanging from a branch overhead had given her away. She wandered toward her uncle, her eyes down.
    â€œGreetings, Dyami,” she said. A lump rose in her throat; she had kept from crying ever since leaving Lakshmi’s house, but tears were threatening to come.
    â€œWhat are you doing here so late?” Dyami asked. “Did Risa send you to meet me? I didn’t tell her I’d stop at Iris’s monument, but she must have guessed that I would.”
    â€œI thought—” She swallowed hard as Dyami knelt next to her. “I
thought you’d be at the house already.”
    â€œThe airship