Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  It burbled some more, and, pushing away its chair, rose to its feet: twin scaled, long flippers with webbing extending down between the legs past the knobs of knees, far more suited to water than to land. On the land, shreeliala waddled rather than walked. “Come,” it said, and gestured. I rose from my own seat.

  “It’s a long walk to the Pit,” I told it, “and on the steep side.” I gestured at the space where my legs should have been. “Do you think …?”

  It stared at me with huge eyes that blinked wetly. From the tank on its back, a nozzle hissed and sprayed thick, gelid water over the shreeliala. “Come,” it said again. The command in its voice reminded me of the way Obaasan Evako spoke.

  I came, calling to the bartender that I’d be back for that Scotch later. She grimaced, clearly annoyed, though whether it was with me or Hasalalo or both of us, I couldn’t tell. She shook her head as we left.

  I shouldn’t have worried about the walk. As we left the bar, an open-topped scooter hurried quickly over through the rain from somewhere farther down the street, driven by another shreeliala, illuminated by flashes of lightning and accompanied by thunder. Hasalalo entered the small cab behind the driver, then gestured to me. “Come,” it said again. As I slid into the seat alongside it, Hasalalo leaned forward and said something to the driver in English: the shreeliala never spoke anything but English while on land. The driver nodded; the scooter whined and complained as it made its way away from the harbor. We moved back up Blackstone’s single road toward the plateau on which the port sat, and beyond it—now along an unpaved, potholed trail—toward the caldera that sat near Blackstone’s summit. The hot spot in the crust that had created both Blackstone and the Great Darkness had moved on millennia ago and was undoubtedly building up a new island somewhere to the northwest. Once, this place would have been a steaming, hissing hell where the eternal rain hammered at sputtering lava flows. No more; the volcano of Blackstone was long dormant and cold. The driver stopped near the rim of the crumbling crater, and we got out into a driving rain, with lightning crackling around us. I’d thumbed on my rainshield as soon as we’d left the bar; Hasalalo seemed to relish the wetness.

  Here, on the highest mountain that Venus had to offer, modest as it was, I could look out at the unbroken sweep of the Always Sea—at least to what the storm allowed me to see. I thought that, out past Blackstone Bay, where the long ocean swells started, I could glimpse a darker green-blue against the lighter gray-green: the Great Darkness.

  I could smell the caldera long before I could see it. We made our way slowly over the broken, eroded volcanic rock to where we could look down, and I wished that the rainshield could keep out odors as well as rain.

  The caldera stank of rotting flesh. Shreeliala bodies, in various stages of decomposition, were scattered down the sides of the caldera in front of us, some of them half-draped over the slope just in front of us, as if they’d been tossed aside like so much unwanted trash. The floor of the crater was littered with their bones, flashing white in the erratic lightning flashes. Wrigglers—the blue-green, maggotlike worms that were one of Venus’s few land creatures—fed on the decaying matter. I gagged at the smell of rotting flesh and had to fight to keep my last meal in my stomach.

  Hasalalo was staring down with me, though I couldn’t read the expression on its face to see if it matched the horror on mine. I looked more closely at the closest skeletons to us. Nested in the bones, I saw small clusters of rounded pebbles, rocks unlike any of the volcanic variety on Blackstone. Little groups of them were plentiful, almost as plentiful as the bones. I crouched down to look more closely: the stones were smoothed on their ridges though the rest of the rock was rough, as if they’d already been in a tumbler for a few hours. I glanced at Hasalalo and pointed to the nearest pile: four or five of the stones caged under the curve of a shreeliala’s ribs. “May I …?” I asked Hasalalo, who gave me an almost perfect human shrug. I hoped it meant the same thing and reached down for one of the stones, carefully trying to avoid touching the bones that enclosed it. I managed to fish one out between two fingers and stood up, looking at it closely. In my hand, rain no longer varnished its surface; it dried quickly almost as if the stone was absorbing the water. The stone was reddish, with light gray veins marbling it; the higher surfaces were almost polished, the lower ones still had lots of surface irregularities. I turned it in my fingers, looking at the black, glassy highlights and wondering how it would look after I ran it through my tumbler. Blackstone Mountain. The Pit. Venus. “Can I keep this?” I asked Hasalalo.

  Its bubbler hissed. Hasalalo was watching me. Its underlids slid over its eyes and remained there as the rain started to pelt down harder: no longer a sheeter, but now what the locals called a “pounder.” “Why?” it asked.

  I reached into my pocket with my free hand and pulled out my little collection of polished rocks, displaying them to Hasalalo in my palm. “It’s amazing what a rock looks like when you polish it like this. They become little jewels: the essence of the stone. Or maybe it’s the truth inside the stone. It’s something I do, everywhere I go. See, this one: it’s a rock I took from the beach the last time I was here.” Blue-black glass, so finely polished that you could see the darker imperfections floating inside like planets nested in a dark nebula.

  Hasalo leaned over my hand and stretched out a web-snaggled finger to touch it. “This is one of the black stones?”

  I nodded. “Pretty, isn’t it? I’d like to do the same with this stone from the pit, just to see how it comes out, to see what beauty it’s hiding.”

  “Do you know what you hold?”

  I shook my head.

  A hiss from the bubbler. “You know what happens to those of bones-of-stone when they die?”

  “Yes. You release the bodies over the Great Darkness. There’s something about reincarnation for a few, and, well, your gods … umm, the Lights-in-Water are down there and, uh …” My voice trailed off. The truth was that while I knew the shreeliala had a complex mythology that revolved around the Great Darkness, all that Avariel had cared about was that no human had ever been all the way to the bottom of the Great Darkness and that she’d be the first. Therefore, that was all I cared about, too. Just as I hadn’t bothered to learn how the shreeliala reproduced, I’d also ignored their beliefs. I figured the way they dealt with death was like our own tales of death and afterlife: ancient myth and fantasy, with none of it real.

  “Those with bones-of-stone fall into the Great Darkness,” Hasalalo continued. If it was annoyed at my bumbling narrative of their beliefs, I couldn’t tell. “The Lights-in-Water feed on their flesh, leaving behind their bones, and among the bones are also their stomach-stones. Sometimes, the Lights-in-Water find a particularly beautiful stomach-stone, and they take that stomach-stone back up out of the Great Darkness and place the stone where a bud-mother can find it, and when the bud-mother swallows it, it sprouts a new shreeliala, so that each shreeliala may come back to life again. That’s the possibility that awaits most shreeliala in the Great Darkness, but not those of bones-of-air. I’ve talked to the Eldest of us, and they say that the Pit has always been the same. The Lights-in-Water can’t come here, so the stomach-stones left here never leave, and those who rot here are never reborn.”

  Hasalalo gestured to encompass Blackstone Mountain. “All this came to be because those of bones-of-air went into the Great Darkness by tying rocks around their bodies against all warnings, and the Lights-in-Water of the Always Sea grew angry and vomited up the bones-of-air in a fury of glowing rocks, until the sea bottom rose above the Always Sea as a sign to never do that again. Since then, all of us with bones-of-air have been placed here and are forbidden the Great Darkness. I know Avariel believes this is just superstition, and so you probably think the same. The Lights-in-Water, their choosing of the stomach-stones, everything about the Great Darkness is only myth. Maybe it is. Maybe there’s no difference between what happens to those with bones-of-air and bones-of-stone. This is why I worked wi
th the Green Council to allow Avariel to come back. She said she would tell me what she finds at the bottom of the Great Darkness. If she does, I will know. We will all know.”

  That was by far the longest speech I had ever heard a shreeliala make. Through most of it I was staring at the stone I was holding: a “stomach-stone,” a gastrolith, I knew now. Part of me wanted to drop it: this had been in the gizzard of one of the dead shreeliala, which explained how it had been partially polished, grinding the sea plants that the shreeliala ate.

  “Take the stone and find the truth inside it,” Hasalalo told me as I hesitated. “I wish to see it afterward.”

  I rubbed the stone between my fingers, thinking I could almost feel slime coating it, as if it had just been vomited up. I shivered, but I closed my fingers around it as Hasalalo stared at me. “All right,” I told it. “I’ll get it started tonight. It’ll take a week or more, though. It takes a lot of time to get to the truth, as you put it.”

  Hasalalo seemed to sniff. “If that is so, then why does Avariel never stay anywhere very long? Why do you do the same?”

  To that echo of what Obaasan Evako had once said, I had no answer at all.

  After I left Hasalalo back at Venus Genetrix, after I stopped at my hotel room and removed the rock tumbler I kept in my luggage and started the gastrolith’s polishing, I went to see Avariel. I knew where she’d be: down Blackstone’s single street to where it plunged into a tunnel of Plexiglas and steel and down under the slow waves to Undersea Port proper.

  There, the light was dim and green—more suited to shreeliala eyes than ours—and the odor of brine and fish dominated, mingling with the cinnamon exhalations of shreeliala. Here were the markets for the fish and kelp and other niceties that formed the trade between shreeliala and human; here were the water-filled chambers where human delegates and negotiators could meet with shreeliala officials. Here was the interface between two worlds and two species.

  Avariel and her support crew had taken one of the subs docked there. The street hatch was open, so I went in. I found her in the lower chamber, checking out the diving equipment with a man who’d been part of our support crew last time: Mikhail. “… the fiddling I did with the CCR should give you at least another two hours if you need it. You bought the best rebreather on the market, I know, but now it’s better,” he was saying to her.

  “I hope so,” Avariel said, then she saw me. She gave me the expression of someone suffering from severe acid reflux. “Mikhail,” she said, “why don’t you check with Patrick on the com unit?”

  Mikhail raised a dark eyebrow toward me, the brow rising higher and his mud-brown eyes widening slightly as he noted my missing legs. “Sure,” he said. He was trying not to stare at me. “I’ll do that. Hey, Tomio.”

  “Mikhail. Good to see you again.” The polite thing you say when you’re really saying nothing at all.

  “You, too,” he answered, words equally as empty. Then he glanced at Avariel, shrugged, and left, climbing the ladder to the upper compartment. I watched his legs disappear, but Avariel’s voice pulled me back.

  “What do you want, Tomio? I’m rather busy right now.”

  “You already know.”

  “And I already gave you the answer. No, you can’t go with me. Not this time.” I saw her gaze fall down past my waist to the emptiness there.

  “I can still swim,” I told her, stomping the foot end of the prosthetic field for emphasis. The sole of the shoe was rubber; there wasn’t much sound, even in the hard-walled chamber. “That’s not the problem.”

  “No,” she answered quietly, “that’s not the problem at all.”

  “You’re taking Mikhail? Or Patrick?”

  She was already shaking her head. “I’m doing this alone.”

  “That’s ridiculous. And foolish.”

  She gave a cough that might have been a laugh. “Is it? Were you there when I climbed the last cliffs at Olympus Mons? That final ascent …”

  “I know,” I told her. “You did it on your own. Doesn’t make it any less—” I stopped. “Stupid” was the word on my lips. I could see from her face that she knew it, too. I could also see that the more I argued, the more her answer to me wasn’t going to change, and I could also tell from the release of tension in my gut that I’d wanted her to tell me “no”—because the ghost that I was chasing didn’t involve returning to where the Great Darkness had taken my legs. That ghost was standing in front of me.

  Avariel took a long breath, closing her eyes momentarily as if composing words in her head. Then she looked at me again, her eyes bright. “Look, Tomio. I know what I am: an adrenaline junkie, someone who likes to push the envelope, to do things that no one else has done. And yeah, I like the attention that gets me, too. Your grandmother had me tagged pretty well, and I know myself well enough to admit it now. You—I don’t think you ever knew what you wanted. After your accident in the Great Darkness …” She caught her upper lip in her teeth momentarily, as if biting back something. Mikhail told me afterward that when Avariel came for me, my legs were already gone, crudely guillotined from my body by the rocks. She managed to put tourniquets around the stumps and take me back up to the sub before I entirely bled out. When I came back to consciousness, several days later, she’d already left Venus. “I’m not proud that I left you. But you and me …” Her head shook. I waited. “It wasn’t going to work. I think you knew that as much as I did.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “At the time, I had other things on my mind, like wondering when I’d ever walk again.”

  She sucked in her breath, a hiss like Hasalalo’s bubbler, and I was suddenly repentant. “All right,” I told her, “can I at least be there tomorrow when you dive? I could help Mikhail and Patrick up top.”

  I thought she was going to say no once more. She looked away from me, and down to the dive equipment on the floor. Her head was still shaking, but she took a step toward me, grabbing my hands and looking up into my face. I could see the lines on her face, carved deeper than I remembered, the brown puffiness under her eyes, the small scars on her skin from the burn regeneration. Her fingers pressed mine, tightly.

  It was the closest we’d been since the night she’d left me, in the hospital here.

  “If that’s what you want,” she said, “then all right, for what we once were, for what happened last time.” Then she let go of my hands and stepped back. “If you’re going to be here, then at least help me stow this crap,” she said.

  —–—

  The sub was stationed over the broken rim of the Great Darkness, seemingly perched on great legs of blue-white spotlights, as insubstantial as my own. The Always Sea was deepening here, sloping down the submerged flanks of the volcano that was Blackstone Mountain. Staring out the wide, transparent ports of the sub, I could see several shreeliala gathered at the rim of the Great Darkness below us, with the rounded, woven structures of the shreeliala’s Blackstone Village (our name for it, not theirs) receding away into the green-blue distance toward where its seaweed-draped outskirts met the human buildings of Undersea Port.

  On the rim of the Great Darkness, a great and wide forest of blue-black kelp undulated in the slow currents of the Always Sea. The shreeliala were gathered above the canopy of kelp, and I could see the bubbling forms of shreeliala speech as they spoke amongst themselves. The words of the shreeliala language are essentially shaped water-and-air-bubble structures (which is why they resort to English when out of the water), as much visual as audible. The scientists studying their language are still trying to discern the grammar and construction and putting together a dictionary, but I doubt that any human is ever going to be able to “speak” or understand shreeliala without mechanical help.

  Smelling cinnamon, I spoke aloud. “I wonder what they’re saying?” Hasalalo, aboard the sub with us, peered over my shoulder to the scene below.

  “They’re not pleased that this is happening,” it said. “Many of us, especially those of bones-of-stone, weren’t pl
eased with the Green Council’s decision. They say it is bones-of-air stupidity to permit this.” A long finger stroked the marking on its skull, reflexively.

  “They’re not going to try to stop us, are they?” Mikhail asked from his console. Mikhail’s finger hovered above the com button. On the screen in front of him, we could see Avariel in the dive chamber, with Patrick helping her fit on the last of her gear.

  Hasalalo’s eyes widened. “They don’t think they’ll have to. The Lights-in-Water will do that for them.”

  Mikhail laughed at that, and his finger moved away from the com. “The Lights-in-Water haven’t met Avariel. That woman’s got a nasty mean streak for people who get in her way.” He chuckled again, then glanced at me. The chuckle died.

  “Is that what you think?” I asked Hasalalo. “The Lights-in-Water will stop Avariel?”

  It looked at me placidly. The bubbler gurgled and spat water. “They stopped you.”

  Movement. A flash of brilliance accompanied the pain. Then nothing until I woke up in the hospital. “It was a rockfall that stopped me. I got too close to the edge and hit something unstable,” I told it.

  “I wonder,” Hasalalo answered, “what truth was buried inside those rocks that took your legs?”

  I started to answer it, but Avariel’s voice came over the com and the holoscreens lit up around the compartment. “Going live,” she said, her voice muffled through the rebreather. “Do you have the feed, Mikhail?”

  “Got it,” Mikhail answered. “Everything looks good here.”

  “Fine. I’m going down, then. Wish me luck.”

  Luck, I whispered under my breath. “No luck needed,” Mikhail told her. “You got this. Piece of cake.”

  The image on the holoscreens bounced and swirled, then filled with bubbles as the dive hatch filled with water and opened for her. Avariel swam out into the haze of the sub’s lights, the view on the screen swaying dizzily as she looked up and the camera on her mask picked up the sub above her. Our lights overloaded the camera until it dimmed, then opened up again as she glanced over at the shreeliala gathered at the lips of the canyon, watching her and speaking to each other in a rush of half-glimpsed water shapes. Behind us, we heard Patrick clamber up the metal ladder into our chamber and settle down by the com unit.