“This is strange,” superior Irunn said, and the grin was gone. “The Venuses sound different, but—” She looked at something on one of her screens. “The Venuses are different. We know that. We know their topography is different, with the same types of features—farra, novae, coronae, and a few craters—in unique arrangements.” Inferior Irunn remembered the images from the Dongfang Shuo mission. “Their atmospheres contain the same gases and the same layers, but their cloud formations vary. If life evolved on both Venuses—” Superior Irunn’s mouth closed like a door.
Inferior Irunn hadn’t considered that she was transcribing the transmissions of Venusian life.
“When do we tell ground control about this?” superior Irunn asked.
“When we’re there,” inferior Irunn said, thinking of being ordered to return—of being unable to hear Venus. “When we know if it’s life or, well, the planet?” It sounded laughable to say it, but superior Irunn only smiled in soft understanding.
“Or both,” superior Irunn said. Then, after silence stretched between them like a beam of light, “Look, let’s record some of this now, both of us, your transcriptions and both of our thoughts, and if something happens to us, if the computers register our vital signs stopping, it’s automatically sent to Baghdad and Beijing?”
“Yes,” inferior Irunn said after only a few seconds’ thought.
The inter-craft channel went quiet.
As inferior Irunn created a potentially public packet of ideas and transcription copies, the song swelled. She wrote, flee farra-floor flood, dry drowning, dead-free. Frowned. No. Perhaps: dead-free: fled dry drowning, farra-floor flood. No.
* * *
Year 10 superior Venus vanishes E on Arahsamnu 17 and after one month, twenty-five days appears W on Tebetu 12.
“The data your craft have taken on your approaches match in broad strokes the data from the Dongfang Shuo mission,” ground control said. “We are therefore most interested in your mission’s primary objective: to send you into the atmospheres and, ultimately, to the surfaces.” A thrill lingered on superior Irunn’s spine like superior Venus’s song. “We are in agreement that you should follow the descent plan to arrive at a distant orbit of your Venus, establish continued complete operation of your spacecraft, and, if it is safe, descend to the lower mesosphere.” The technical details of the descent plan appeared beside the small faces of ground control on the transmit screen: calculated projections of altitudes, wind speeds, spacecraft speeds, engine use, fuel consumption.
The word safe fell like acid from the transmit screen.
The sound of Venus stratiformed over superior Irunn’s fingers. “Yes,” she said. “I can confirm the descent plan.”
After the time lag she heard inferior Irunn say the same.
“Thank you for your regular reports,” ground control said. With friendly smiles: “Doing well up there?”
Venus cumuliforming across her chest—
“Oh, you know,” she said, cheerful, “it’s all the same: every day I do my exercises, look at the data, watch superior Venus get bigger.” Venus a virga over her vertebrae— “I’m looking forward to getting a look under its clouds.”
Inferior Irunn said, time-lagged, “I spend a lot of time looking at inferior Venus. It’s very … I’m glad we’re going straight in. I want to see it.”
Ground control signed off soon afterwards. Superior Irunn sat in her chair, song-struck. Venus on her bones. Venus a non-cessation of clouds, a memory of movement across its surface—on her skin—and gases falling into space like hair’s straggling stream in zero gravity. Heat rising like last breaths. Bones like powder on her cheeks.
Superior Irunn drifted in dream and dead-falling, with the weight of superior Venus’s memories around her waist.
Waking, she accessed paper after paper on the possibilities of life on the Venuses. Extremophile single-celled or simple multicellular organisms on the dry surface. Acidophiles in the sulphuric acid clouds. Life absorbing ultraviolet light. Life beyond current scientific comprehension. Love poetry from seventeenth-century Damascus described the lakes on the Venuses, the lovers swimming in each: superior lover and inferior lover, gazing into the cloud-parted sky at the other Venus, longing to swim-cross the space between them. Clouds on superior Irunn’s clenched fists—
She gasped into the ebbing silence of her spacecraft.
* * *
Year 11 inferior Venus sets on Illulu 25 and after sixteen days rises on II Illulu 11.
Inferior Irunn wrote,
drift in no-dark, no-depth, forever falling: dead-free
fled dry drowning, farra-floor flood: dead-falling
She slid the sentences to one side. She wrote,
dead-falling, dead-free:
drift free of old farra, old forms
The paired lines, plausible and inaccurate all at once, confused her. She had heard both. Neither looked true.
Her transcription had stalled at six hundred lines.
Patterns spread through it like pulses of sound, like a sculpture of precise peaks—then it fell apart. It failed to convey what she heard. Discarded sentences could fill a whole screen. Her confidence sagged. Perhaps the sounds of inferior Venus were changing as she got closer to it, perhaps the sounds were damaging her ears—or her sight—and affecting what she wrote. Tests, however, suggested it wasn’t that.
“Perhaps the chaos is the point now,” she said, just to hear a different sound.
The discarded sentences, gathered together, looked like tearing. Part of an atmosphere dispersing into space. Inferior Irunn arranged and rearranged until her eyes hurt.
She appended the repeating six lines to this section, rewriting rather than copying. She needed a rest.
She couldn’t stop the sounds: old sounds, old song-grounds—
When inferior Irunn woke, she reread her work. She compared the repeating six lines to earlier copies, just to check, and gaped: they differed. Subtly, in two words. She knew those words, knew them like her console’s curve, couldn’t write them wrong, and she had heard them before she rewrote them. Heard them as she had immediately written them. Hadn’t she? It had to be a copyist’s error—
Couldn’t it all be a copyist’s error?
Inferior Irunn stared at that growing yellow-tinged sphere and swiped all her transcriptions into storage.
“Exactly six days until we arrive,” she said to superior Irunn, who—some minutes later—replied that her screen told her the same.
* * *
Year 15 superior Venus vanishes E on Abu 26 and after two months appears W on Tashritu 26.
Superior Venus glowed. Superior Irunn watched clouds move across its high atmosphere: swirling pale, swift patterns. The sounds of superior Venus played across her skin.
“Exactly one Earth day until we arrive,” inferior Irunn said.
Together they ran checks. Outer shielding: still intact, self-repairs of micrometeorite damage successfully completed, safe to enter the hot, churning, acidic atmosphere of Venus. Radiation levels: safely low. Oxygen: the tanks, accounting for ongoing algae oxygen-production, were still supplied for a month on Venus and the return to Earth. Fuel: no unexpected adjustments en route had ensured the tanks held enough fuel to control the crafts’ movements in Venus’s atmosphere, escape its gravity well multiple times and return to Earth. Water and food: sufficient supply remaining. Instruments: all reading and recording accurately.
“We’re going to see under Venus’s clouds,” inferior Irunn said.
“And hear,” superior Irunn said.
“Yes.” A pained look.
“We should record it,” superior Irunn said, surprising even herself by voicing a thought she had found too uncomfortable to hold for long.
Inferior Irunn’s face shifted into surprise minutes later. Their conversations went slowly now, with the increased time lag. By the time inferior Irunn spoke, superior Irunn still didn’t regret speaking.
“Record the sounds? Trans
cribe? Or—dance?”
“Record with our instruments, if they detect anything,” superior Irunn said. So far what she understood of their data hadn’t matched what she heard, what she felt on her body, cumulonimbiforms on her back— “And us, yes, we should write or say what we experience.”
“Yes,” inferior Irunn said, taking longer than the time lag.
Superior Irunn finished her checks. Superior Venus grew perceptively in that time. Less than a day. Superior Irunn slept intermittently, skin-sung awake by the sounds of that brilliant ball filling her screens.
* * *
Year 16 inferior Venus sets on Dumuzi 5 and after sixteen days rises on Dumuzi 21.
Inferior Irunn descended past the exosphere and through the thermosphere into the mesosphere on the dayside of inferior Venus at fifty degrees latitude in the northern hemisphere. Atmospheric pressure and temperature climbed. Warnings, but within parameters, accompanied her craft along the wind’s current. Clouds climbed closer. Winds wrote.
Gale-glib winds, white-gleaming and gifting words.
The craft descended along its planned route into the lower mesosphere, as deep as they intended to go on this first attempt.
Clouds cover it, compass it, carry it and cry cacophony-cantos.
Inferior Irunn tried to transcribe them, but it took too long: her hands, her voice too slow for inferior Venus’s song. Her body shook. Her eyes saw sounds, her ears heard none of her craft’s updates. Too much. She tried to say what she felt: the pain, the planet-touched perspectives. She managed:
Day 1 inferior Irunn: words yellow in my ears like pleas, I cannot taste what they touch, I—
Superior Irunn’s screams interrupted inferior Irunn’s shaking, halting speech.
The craft’s computer registered superior Irunn’s notation:
Day 1 superior Irunn: arahhhh aaaa.
Fly farra-round routes. Wind-whipped on. Sulphur sings up inferior Irunn’s spine in screamed ecstasy, contorts her, cuneiform-carves her carpus. Words flow across inferior Irunn’s tongue, but she cannot write. She cries. What wasted words: sounds senseless. Venus vents! Its stories remain unknown.
* * *
Year 16 superior Venus vanishes E on Adar 24 and after two months, fifteen days appears W on Simanu 9.
Superior Irunn screams, skin sculpted into stories too topographical to tell. Mountains at her midriff. Plains at her pelvis. Arachnoids in her arching, her coronae contortions: gripped in gravity and ground, pestle-pained, into ink. Her body writes no stories. Clouds climb her collarbones, virga-vertiginous. Her screams fill the log file. Her agony an aria, a failed folksong. Venus vents! Its stories remain unknown.
The spacecraft computers communicated. Corrected.
* * *
Year 17 inferior Venus sets on Adar 8 and after three days rises on Adar 11.
Inferior Irunn woke on the wall of her spacecraft, held in place by straps. Blood hung in perfect spheres. Sweat spheres, too. Urine? Her body hurt. Her throat felt wind-scoured. Scream-torn. Her ears registered a faint moaning: not hers. Superior Irunn. The transmit icon shone like superior Venus, a bright dot on one of her screens, and inferior Irunn groaned gently, closing her eyes. She wanted to sleep, sleep it away, sleep until the singing stopped and the wind—
“It’s stopped,” superior Irunn’s shattered voice said. A cough. A cry. “I can think.” Not stopped, but not the screaming immersion of inferior Venus’s atmosphere. “I can hear other things, not just Venus. The computer. You—are you?”
Inferior Irunn opened her eyes, released the straps, and manoeuvred herself into her chair, wincing. Moving in zero gravity had never made her wince. The computer’s additions to the screen resolved. The computers had communicated, superior with inferior, and coordinated both spacecraft into identical locations flying far above the north poles of both Venuses: far from its winds and clouds.
“I’m here,” inferior Irunn said.
After the time lag said superior Irunn, “It hurts.”
Inferior Irunn read and reread the data on her screen. Superior Irunn stared into the transmit screen, stared at inferior Irunn.
“We were down there for two hours,” inferior Irunn said. Every word hurt. “It didn’t feel like that. It felt—” She shook her head, reread the vital signs data. “I was conscious for an hour. How?”
“I saw the surface of Venus,” superior Irunn said with eyes like farra formations: round and flat.
Inferior Irunn reread the data for superior Irunn’s craft and saw that it hadn’t descended into the troposphere, hadn’t seen the surface in the visual spectrum. Other instruments had pierced the clouds beneath the craft, but not superior Irunn’s eyes. “How?”
“All over my body.”
“How?” Inferior Irunn knew that she might as well ask herself how it felt to be full of inferior Venus’s voice—but she wanted an answer, wanted an explanation that amounted to more than the two Venuses on—in—their bodies.
“I know it.”
“Come on, that’s senseless.” Like her own experience.
“I want to see it again.”
Inferior Irunn felt her heart stutter at superior Irunn’s words. “We need to decide what to do next. We need to talk to ground control—they’ll have seen our vitals data, they’ll know we went unconscious. We need to decide what to tell them. I don’t know about you, but I need to clean up in here, wash, hydrate, eat.”
Minutes later, superior Irunn nodded and said that they should tend to themselves and their craft, then discuss their reports. Inferior Irunn forced herself to move. Her craft’s computer was already managing the airflow to process the waste. The medical unit told her that she had bruises and shallow cuts, and gave her the right patches to soothe and heal. She washed, changed into a new suit, drank, ate, thought—yellow lowing cloud-loud, crying, dry clod-dying—only of inferior Venus: the cacophony of sounds.
The disappointment.
At the console, she read the data again.
“Ground control will tell us to return,” superior Irunn said. Disappointment gusted in her voice like the clouds of the Venuses.
“We can’t ignore them,” inferior Irunn said.
“We can. We’re millions of kilometres away, and they can’t remotely control our craft, not while we’re conscious.” She added, before inferior Irunn’s reply—saying almost the same—reached her, “Well, I suppose they could do it, if they overrode the computer. I’m sure they can.”
“They would do it if they considered us insane,” inferior Irunn also said.
“We have to report. And then—” They both wanted it. “Then we descend again.”
“Yes,” superior Irunn breathed.
Unsaid: descend even if ground control ordered them not to.
The data had told inferior Irunn that it wasn’t enough to arrive at each planet—inferior Irunn for inferior Venus, superior Irunn for superior Venus—in one mission. “If we do it together,” she said, “precisely together—if our computers coordinate the timing of the descent—we could survive it.” Precisely paired like the planets. “We could see Venus, all of it, and fulfil our mission.” To see it. To take samples. “We arrived one and a half minutes apart, our computers calculate. Too much. This time, we’ll descend together.”
To hear the songs underneath the sky. What sounds were there on the ground? Fear twisted inferior Irunn’s stomach.
“If we go down and we go into that—that state—the computers will bring us back up,” superior Irunn said. “The second we go unconscious, we return to where we are now.”
“Yes.”
“I want to see it. We’re the first people to see Venus, and barely!”
“Then we go home,” inferior Irunn said. “We don’t try again. That’s it.”
To descend.
“Yes.”
“Let’s rest for at least ten hours. Then write our reports—they have the data already; they’ll have plenty to analyse—then—” Half fear, half excit
ement. “Let’s try this again.”
* * *
Year 18 superior Venus vanishes E on Arahsamnu 13 and after one month, twenty-five days appears W on Tebetu 8.
Their computers coordinated a synchronous descent through the thermosphere and the mesosphere down to the troposphere. Superior Irunn monitored the state of her spacecraft. It followed its course stably, remaining within safe operational parameters. The transmit icon blinked: ground control. The clouds climbed. Parted. Superior Irunn gasped at the ground.
Sulphur turns to bone: ghost writing in a language that the winds wend into Irunn’s fingers.
Precisely paired, superior Irunn and inferior Irunn transcribed together:
Superior Irunn: The dead are planted pelvis-deep in the plains of Venus, growing memories
Inferior Irunn: that seek the sky and its stars scattered overhead like ossicles, awaiting
Superior Irunn: our scream
Inferior Irunn: our scream
Superior Irunn: cloud-caught cantos-screaming
Inferior Irunn: I walked on webs braid-bonded to bridges over waters burn-bright and I was bold, bold—I died—we died—billions of years before your bones built you—we dream—Venus alive!—overhead a veil-sky vestment-kind, soft-voiced, killing slowly—if farra-found life plied far from its plain it perished—novae-novices broken navicular-bold, newly burning, betrayed—coronae circles cuneiform-boned by burnt brethren—we died by
Superior Irunn: Venus suffocating, sky hating, stars fading
Inferior Irunn: listen, legends-long songs glisten
Days flew by.
Megabytes accreted.
In a still moment, superior Irunn said, “Venus wants us to tell it.” Its history inking her bones. “It wants to share its stories with us, with life.”
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