Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  “There were twenty-six people here,” Katya said. “All men?”

  “Of course,” the chief petty officer said. “They were here to work. They didn’t need distraction.”

  “All men,” Katya said. “And they didn’t do too well, did they?”

  They swept through the buildings. Dormitories. A mess hall. Offices. Stores. Two generators purring in a shack constructed from concrete blocks and corrugated iron. An assay lab and a small clinic. A cold store with three bodies wrapped in black plastic sheeting. One had been badly mangled in some accident; the other two looked like suicides—a ligature of electrical cable around the neck, slashed wrists. Five more dead men were sprawled behind one of the dormitory huts, hands bound, chests torn by what appeared to be gunshot wounds, bullet holes in the hut’s plank wall. Another body sprawled at the foot of the radio mast. His neck was broken, and Katya suggested that he had fallen while climbing.

  “Climbing to escape from monsters, like your patient on the crane?” Captain Chernov said. “Or perhaps trying to escape from Americans who shot his friends.”

  “Perhaps they all went stir-crazy in this damn fog,” the chief petty officer said. “There was a quarrel. It got out of hand …”

  “Something drove them mad, perhaps,” Captain Chernov said thoughtfully.

  The prefab buildings were empty although there were signs that people had left with some haste. Plates of food rotting on tables in the mess, papers scattered on the floor of the office, a record rotating on a gramophone in one of the dormitory huts, making an eerie scratching click until Captain Chernov lifted the needle. The gun locker was open and empty, but apart from the five men who had been lined up and shot there was no sign of any struggle, no blood spray, no bullet holes anywhere else. And no sign of the sixteen men still unaccounted for.

  “They ran off, or they were taken prisoner,” Captain Chernov said. “If they ran off, we will find them. If they were taken prisoner, we will find the Americans who did it.”

  “With respect, I don’t think this was anything to do with Americans,” Katya said.

  “The so-called libertarians took hostages for ransom when they attacked our trawlers and merchant ships,” Captain Chernov said. “And executed them when no ransom was paid. What happened here, perhaps, was caused by some kind of psychological-war weapon. A gas, a volatile drug. After the men were driven mad by it, the Americans walked in, shot the few still able to resist, and took the rest prisoner. I see you do not like this story, Doctor. Well, if you have a better idea about what happened here, I should like to hear it.”

  “I don’t have enough evidence to form a hypothesis,” Katya said, and realized that it sounded stiff and priggish and defensive.

  The captain smiled. He was having fun with her. “You hope to find monsters. You hope for fame. Very well. Let’s go look for them.”

  Katya trailed after the party of seamen as Captain Chernov and the chief petty officer led them along the quayside, past pyramidal heaps of ore, past a row of articulated dump trucks: powerful machines with six-wheel drive and rugged tires as tall as a person. They moved slowly and cautiously through the fog, checking under the trucks, checking shipping containers and stacks of empty crates. Arkadi Sarantsev hung back with Katya, asking her if she really thought monsters had attacked the station, if they were right now feeding on men they had killed.

  “That’s what the captain thinks I think,” Katya said.

  “Do you think he is wrong, about something driving the men crazy?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it was something to do with the isolation,” Katya said. “That, and the fog.”

  “But not, you think, Americans,” Arkadi Sarantsev said.

  He had a nice smile and a cool attitude, had knotted a red handkerchief at the throat of his telnyashka shirt. He plucked a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and offered it to Katya; when she refused with a shake of her head, he put the pack to his lips, plucked out a cigarette, and lit it with a heavy petrol lighter fashioned from a .50 cal cartridge case.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that your captain was looking for an excuse to take on the American research ship,” she said.

  “The captain’s father was one of the pioneer settlers,” Arkadi said. “We all resent the capitalists, with their nuclear rockets and supercomputers and frontier mentality, but the pioneer families especially resent them. As far as the captain is concerned, their offer of help is a personal insult.”

  Katya had once sort of dated a Navy diver, who one drunken night had told her how a friend of his had come to the surface too quickly because his dive computer had malfunctioned. He had been stricken with the bends, screaming with the pain of nitrogen bubbles in his joints, fed vodka by his mates because they had no way of treating him. Their patrol boat had been making a hopeless dash to the nearest port when an American frigate which had intercepted its call for help had caught up with it and had taken off the stricken man and treated him in its decompression chamber. Katya’s boyfriend had tried to make it into a joke, saying that his friend had not only beaten the bends but had discovered a tremendous hangover cure into the bargain, but it was the usual sad story of crazy Russian machismo combined with a massive inferiority complex.

  She said to Arkadi, “I know your captain took things very personally in the war against the libertarians.”

  “He disobeyed orders when he staged that raid, yes. But he captured an important warlord and his entourage, and also rescued more than twenty hostages.”

  She had to smile at Arkadi’s sudden passion. “You think he’s a hero.”

  “One time, two years ago, we had the job of visiting a small island close to the South Pole,” Arkadi said. “Very remote, very desolate. No one lives there, but it is important we have a claim on it. A previous expedition set up a beacon and also landed goats there. The idea was that they would breed and provide a source of fresh meat to any ships that passed by. We were tasked to clean the beacon’s solar panels and replace its storage battery, and also to find out how the goats were doing.”

  “I can imagine what Captain Chernov thought about that.”

  “He believed that he was keeping the borders of the People’s Republic safe,” Arkadi said. “That is what he told us, at any rate. Well, a small party of us land. We cannot find any trace of the goats. Not so much as a bone. There are pancake crabs everywhere, though, so we think the goats died and the crabs ate them. The island is a volcanic cone, extinct. Black rocks, tangles of thorny bushes, and everywhere pancake crabs. Watching us from under stones, creeping close to us whenever we stop as we climb to where the beacon was placed.

  “All the way around the top of the island’s cone there is a thick belt of feather palms. Smaller than the ones on the Big Island, but still much taller than anything else growing there. And there are pancake crabs in the palms. As we make our way through them, the crabs drop on us. They stick to our skin with those suckers they have, we have to prize them off. It is disgusting, but we do not think it dangerous. At the top, there is a caldera, a deep funnel with a lake at the bottom. We find the beacon and do our work. We rest up, and a couple of idiots roll a boulder over the edge. It drops into the lake far below and makes a big splash. And after the ripples die away, there is another splash, more ripples. As if something had woken down there.”

  “You found a monster?”

  “We did not see anything. Just the splash and the ripples. And we did not have any way of climbing down. So we start back down, and the wind changes direction, and it begins to rain. And then two of us become sick. An allergic reaction to the pancake crabs, we find out later. It rains harder. Rain blowing sideways on the wind. And when we get to the inlet where we left the boat, we find big waves rolling in and the boat has floated off, is riding on the waves at the mouth of the inlet. Captain Chernov strips off and swims out to the boat, but he can’t bring it near the rocks where the rest of us are waiting because the waves are too fierce.
And by now the two sick men are very sick indeed, and they can’t swim out. So he motors off to the ekranoplan and comes back with a rocket line, shoots it from boat to shore, and uses it to swing the sick men above the waves to the boat, and everyone is saved.”

  “What about the monster?”

  “We didn’t go back to look. But while we wait to be rescued, we have some bad thoughts about it. Imagine it creeping up the cliffs inside the caldera, creeping toward where we are sheltering … But the point is, whatever they say about the captain, he is not a monster. He did the right thing, in the war, and the brass punished him because he made them look bad. Listen to that. It isn’t dogs, is it? It is in no way any kind of dog.”

  “It doesn’t sound like pigs, either,” Katya said.

  The monotonous barking was loud and close now, coming from somewhere beyond a low rise crowned with a clump of bottlebrush trees. Katya and Arkadi watched as Captain Chernov and three seamen made a forking run, passing left and right around the trees, disappearing into streaming whiteness.

  Two minutes passed. Three. No shots. No shouts. Katya’s heart beat high as she strained to see into the fog. She badly wanted to know what was making that noise, but her hindbrain was telling her to run far and run fast. Arkadi lit another cigarette, and Katya pretended that she didn’t see the flame of his lighter trembling when he applied it. The barking continued without pause. Eventually one of the seamen appeared on top of the ridge, a shadowy figure in the haze, scissoring his arms over his head to indicate the all clear.

  There was a vegetable garden on the other side of the ridge, neat rows of potatoes and cabbage enclosed by a double fence of wire mesh to keep out pancake crabs, green leaves vivid and alien against the purples of the belt of native scrub beyond. And there was a paddock of bare earth inside a fence of wooden stakes and wire where two pigs lay in a muddy wallow, flanks heaving as they hacked and barked. Each time they coughed, bloody froth burst from their muzzles. The bodies of three other pigs lay swollen and rotting nearby, avid crowds of pancake crabs jostling and burrowing into them. Katya caught a strong whiff of ripe decay as she leaned against the fence. It seemed to tint the fog with the monochrome hue of grief.

  “Here are your monsters, Doctor,” Captain Chernov told her. “Would you care to examine them?”

  The chief petty officer wanted to put the pigs out of their misery. Katya said that they should try to find out what had infected them first and was surprised when Captain Chernov agreed.

  “This sickness could be a reaction to a nerve agent,” he said.

  “Or something they caught from the local biota,” Katya said.

  “Native diseases do not infect people,” Captain Chernov said. “Or pigs.”

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” Katya said. “But life on Earth and Venus shares the same genetic code and presumably the same common ancestor. As far as Venusian viruses and bacteria are concerned, people and pigs are no more than new sets of mucous membranes to be penetrated, new masses of cytoplasm to be exploited and subverted.”

  “First you hope to find monsters,” Captain Chernov said. “Now you hope to find the Venusian flu. Your expectations are dwindling, Doctor. If you want to make yourself useful, help Mr. Sarantsev search the offices for diaries, logs, any records that might reveal what has happened. Meanwhile, I must look for the missing miners although I am pretty sure I will not find them.”

  “Because the Americans took them?”

  “I am sure that like all scientists, you believe in logic. And logic tells us that if they are not here, they must be somewhere else,” Captain Chernov said, and told Arkadi to make sure that Dr. Ignatova did not get into any trouble, and roared off with the rest of his men toward the open-cast mine in two trucks.

  Katya found a log in the station’s small clinic, found an entry three weeks old that noted two men displaying symptoms of a flulike infection: high temperatures, involuntary movements of the arms and legs, night sweats, recovery within twenty-four hours. By then, more men had become infected. It had swiftly passed through the camp, and everyone appeared to have succumbed, including the station’s chemist, who doubled as its medical officer. In the assay lab, Katya found a photograph showing him standing with his two teenage daughters in front of the First Footstep monument on Big Island: a gangling, sandy-haired man with heavy-framed glasses and a high forehead. She had seen him before. He was one of the men who had been shot to death. His name was Georgi Zhzhyonov.

  For a week after the last men came down with what he called twenty-four-hour flu, he’d made only routine notes in his log. Then there was a terse entry about a suicide—a man had hanged himself. Another man walked in front of a truck. More entries: fistfights, a nonfatal stabbing, broken bones due to drunkenness. Two men disappeared one night; three the next. One was found clinging to the top of a tall tree and brought down. The next day he was found dead, his wrists slashed open. A man hanged himself; four others disappeared. The last note, in Georgi Zhzhyonov’s neat, slanting script, read I suffer from the most vivid and peculiar dreams.

  Katya found the forms certifying the deaths of the suicides, with notes on bloodwork. Georgi Zhzhyonov had run samples through his gas spectrometer, looking for heavy metals and toxins, finding only trace levels of tin and titanium, well within expected limits. He had also examined the blood of two pigs. Katya felt a chill at the base of her spine. The men had become ill; the pigs had become ill; Georgi Zhzhyonov had been trying to find a link. And because he was a metallurgist, he had used the tools of his trade.

  There was a geological map on one wall of his little lab. Katya studied it carefully. The broad curve of the shoreline with sandbars running parallel to it. A black rectangle marking the site of the station. A series of steeply contoured ridges rising behind, with red stipplings indicating known deposits of ore. The site of the open-cast mine was marked on the first ridge by a crosshatched rectangle. She ran her finger along the top of the ridge, noting the high spots.

  Arkadi Sarantsev, searching the disordered office of the mining station’s commandant, had made his own discovery.

  “Fish,” he told Katya.

  “Fish?”

  “A lot of fish.” Arkadi waggled a video disc. “Luckily for us, the commandant liked to make home movies.”

  It was short, choppily edited. Panning shots across windrows of black fish on a sandbar that faded into fog, black fish rising and falling on shallow waves. A zoom shot closing on fish shimmying and leaping out of the water, landing on fish already dead or dying. Skinny, armor-plated fish with pale gill ruffs and bulbous eyes. A close-up that included the cameraman’s boots, showing several fish writhing in circles, snapping at their own tails. Men scooping fish into buckets, tipping the buckets into oil drums in the well of a skiff. Men shoveling fish into the water, men throwing fish at each other. A small bulldozer rolling back and forth in the fog, turning up combers of sand and fish and pushing them into the water. Waves rolling in, black with blood, agitated by the splashing of scavengers come to feed.

  Katya insisted on replaying the scenes of the men at work. Ten men, twenty, twenty-five. And the cameraman, the commandant, made twenty-six. Everyone in the mining station had joined in the macabre beach party, and none of them had worn protective clothing. Most were dressed in bathing trunks and flip-flops; several were buck naked.

  “When was this?” she said.

  “Four weeks ago,” Arkadi said.

  “And a week later, the men started to become sick,” she said, and gave a quick account of Georgi Zhzhyonov’s notes. The suicides, the disappearances, the cryptic note about dreams.

  Arkadi showed her the commandant’s diary. Notes on patrols sent to search the forest behind the station, of sightings of men or man-shaped animals, of strange noises. Toward the end, the commandant’s handwriting degenerated to a jagged scrawl. The last entry consisted of a few indecipherable words and drawings of skulls, fanged devil faces, daggers dripping blood.

  “So you think
it was the fish,” Arkadi said. “The fish infected them, or they ate the fish and it made them sick. Sick in the body and in the head.”

  “It may be slightly more complicated than that,” Katya said. “I think they fed the pigs with some of the fish. I need to examine them.”

  She found boxes of vinyl gloves in the little lab and face masks she soaked in bleach. It wasn’t much protection, but it was the best she could manage. She didn’t want to get close to the pigs, not without wearing a full contamination suit, so she and Arkadi rigged a sampler from a scaffold pole and a cup taped to the end, and, after some maneuvering, managed to collect a draft of froth from one of them. She treated it like plutonium, carefully tipping it into a plastic bottle and double-bagging the bottle.

  She had noticed no less than six microscopes stacked in unopened boxes in the lab. No doubt the result of the same kind of supply error in central stores that had packed the ekranoplan’s stores with tins of no other kind of soup but pumpkin. She set one up on the knife-scarred butcher’s table in the kitchen of the mess, then used a rolling pin to knock out a window.

  “Six microscopes,” she told Arkadi, “but not one microscope slide.”

  She plucked a small splinter of window glass, put on a fresh set of vinyl gloves, adjusted her mask, smeared a drop of pig sputum on the splinter and set it on the platform of the microscope, and bent over it and adjusted the focus knob until the smear swam into focus.

  Nothing.

  She swept the platform on which the splinter was clamped back and forth, fingertips sweating on the vernier knobs, on the fine-focus knob, feeling a touch of the funk she remembered from undergraduate practical classes when she’d failed to see the thing she was meant to see.

  “What do you see?” Arkadi said.

  “Nothing. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

  She had explained her idea on the way to sample the stricken pig’s sputum, explained that Georgi Zhzhyonov had been on the right track but he had been looking in the wrong place. On Earth, she told Arkadi, there were diseases passed from animals to humans. Zoonoses. It was possible that the brain-burning flu was one such. The miners had fed their pigs with raw fish—all that free protein, willingly throwing itself ashore—and an infection carried by the fish had flourished in the animals. They had become reaction vessels, growing ill, coughing up infected sputum. Perhaps the man who fed the pigs had become ill first, then had infected everyone else. Or perhaps the men had become infected after eating undercooked pork. Katya had been hoping that it was some kind of parasite. Something she could see under the microscope. Worms. Fungal cells. Spores. Cysts.