So, message packets and the occasional radioactive rover were couriered by him back and forth over the Spine of Ishtar. Looking at the map, Kiran saw that the giant high plateau that dominated the western half of Ishtar (and would that be the Shoulders of Ishtar or the Butt of Ishtar?) was named Lakshmi Planum. He didn’t know if this was a coincidence or an allusion. He had to wear a personal dosimeter, and the millisieverts clicked on up. It was lucky that the longevity treatments had good mutation repair therapies!

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 sanwubefore it’s all over, you’ll see. Or maybe even fourwithouts, 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 cliché. 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 matrazenlagerof her work unit. After a few repetitions of this Kiran was accepted as part of her work unit’s lodge, which was nice.

One time he was coming back into Colette when it seemed to him that someone was watching him, and when he noticed this, the person began to close on him. A big man, and his quick glance revealed to Kiran the existence of another person behind Kiran. Immediately Kiran bolted into one of the jammed alleyways and jinked through the back of an open-front shop, causing an uproar that he hoped would delay the people following him. After that it was a matter of dashing as hard as he could, deeper and deeper into the maze of circular alleys that made up Colette’s downtown. Zigzagging often, he hurried to Lakshmi’s little Colette office and drew himself up before the security person at the front desk with aplomb. “Here to see Lakshmi,” he huffed. The security person’s eyebrows shot up his forehead and instantly there was a gun pointing at Kiran’s face.

It took a while for Lakshmi to get over to Colette, and in that time the guards didn’t want him to leave the office. It was pretty much like being under arrest, but when Lakshmi arrived, she seemed pleased with his escape.

“There’s a closed building under the rim at 123 in Cleopatra,” she said when he was done with his story. “Move to Cleopatra, stay with your friend there, and just float for a while. See if you can figure out how many people go in and out of that building per day. I think Shukra’s trying to set up a xiaojinkuin my town.”

“Does that work like a hawala?” Kiran asked.

Lakshmi did not acknowledge that he had spoken. She left and then Kiran was free to go.

So the next time he was in Cleopatra, Kiran floated. He went across the city into the 110 district, where the radial boulevards were less frequent and the buildings often industrial in size and purpose. The bars were correspondingly bigger as well. He went into one near the 123 facility and sat near the slot where the bartender gave drinks to the waiters. He turned on his translation glasses and stared forward like he was watching something on them, slurping bad beer and reading the translation of the voices around him.

They’re too beautiful, it’s a mistake.

Lakshmi wanted them that way.

Shhh! She who must not be named!

But Kiran could hear them laughing. The glasses did not print out in red Ha Ha Ha!as in a comic book; he wished they would.

After an evening of listening to bar patrons he stood around for a while in the street, took a cable car up to the rim promenade, and walked above the neighborhood in question, looking down casually. He had his spectacles record the conversations going on around him. Later that night, back down near the city center, he sat in a corner table of a bar and played verbal translations of what he had recorded, hoping he had caught some security people talking. “She has to stop this, it’s too much.” But another one was not happy to hear this: “We work for Big Pears, just do it.”

Kiran kept replaying the spectacles’ recordings and translations, trying to get the hang of the Chinese tones as well as ponder the sense of the scraps of talk. There was “a man from Shanghai,” it seemed. Nánrén husheng.This seemed to be a man of importance. Shanghai was inundated, he thought. Maybe it was another code phrase. There was a song in the song bar: “My home was in Shanghai—now it’s underwater—I came to Venus because I did not want to live with the fishes—but now here I am, and it’s wetter than the bottom of the sea—and full of sharks! Goodness gracious!”