and directed the hives of metal beetles that scoured the surface of Venus for precious metals.
Still Sparta listened . . . .
She heard no one in the corridor near her cabin. Tuning her visual cortex to infrared, she scanned the darkness of the low apartment. She saw nothing but the glowing wall circuits–no living thing had passed this way in the last hour.
Her chemical senses reported nothing out of the ordinary.
She willed herself to relax. She was in no danger. Nothing external had awakened her, nothing external had triggered the falling dream. Another fragment of her wrecked and submerged memory had broken off and floated to the surface.
The signs . . . the stripes of the dream-tiger were made of signs. Sometime not long ago she had dreamed of signs, but she couldn’t remember where, or what she had dreamed.
She went to the room’s single big window. The heavy steel shutter was the old-fashioned kind, operated by a handcrank. Slowly she cranked it back. As the shutter folded upon itself, Venus light flooded her cabin, and the starside bulge of the green garden sphere swelled before her, ending in an artificial horizon a kilometer away.
As she gazed upon the tiny world of glass and steel, she felt the headache that had been plaguing her in recent weeks coming on again. She set her thumbs into the corners of her jaw and reached behind her neck, massaging the back of her skull with her fingertips. It helped a little. She went to the closet and began to dress.
She pulled on sleek black pants that hugged her legs and gave them the look of machined plastic; she sealed their ankle seams over ribbed black boots. Her top was tight and high, of banded black vinyl. She wore her clothes like armor.
She looked toward her wall screen, fixing it with her dark blue gaze. The screen’s remote-control unit lay on her bedside table, two meters away. She stretched her arms and curved her hands in an ancient symbol of benediction, but this was no blessing: under her heart, the structures built into her diaphragm sparked into life. The odd web of doped ceramic “wires” that looped around her bones coursed with electric current. Her belly burned–
–and the wall screen brightened with an image.
Good trick, making things work at a distance–she was learning to do it more easily. With her arms still raised, she aimed another silent burst of intention at the screen; the image skipped forward, then steadied. Sparta lowered her arms to her sides. The recorded image was one of those Forster and Merck had brought back from the surface, one of the best.
The picture that unscrolled on the wallscreen looked like an aerial reconnaisance film from a low-flying aircraft, an aircraft that was buzzing columns of tanks or maybe rows of factory buildings–intricate structures at a uniform height above the plain. Sparta heard the voice and watched the picture out of the corner of her eye and imagined it playing to an audience of bomber pilots in a Quonset hut, receiving their final mission briefing. It was the lighting of the recorded image–a single strong light from below–that tricked the brain into switching depth for height and misreading the scale. The columns and rows were inscriptions, scanned by a wide-angle lens, lines upon lines of characters deeply incised in metal plate.
These were the signs painted on the dream-tiger’s hide.
From the screen a voice boomed in the shadows, Professor Forster’s voice, hearty with menace, reciting facts that had to be faced. “It will be conceded by my colleague Professor Merck, I think, that in every example found at this locus we have now firmly established the run of the writing–not strictly left to right, as Birbor has insisted on the basis of the Martian fragment, nor strictly right to left, as Suali has surmised on grounds known only to himself–nor even, for those of you who have just jumped to the conclusion, boustrophedon, as the ox plows, back and forth. It is none of those. Anyone
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