Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  “Hey, Avariel, you’re green across the board here,” Patrick said. “Ready?”

  She looked down, and we saw the blue-black below that the sub’s light could not penetrate. Her arm came into view, laden with her dive watch and depth instrumentation. “Everything looks green here, too,” she said. “Patrick, Mikhail, I’m heading down.”

  I tried not to feel insulted by the lack of any reference to me.

  On the screens, we watched the water around her slowly darken and the readout from her depth gauge climb just as slowly. She stayed near the edge of the canyon wall, as we had both done the last time, but not—I noted—as closely as I had clung to it. As the sub’s light faded, she switched on the mask’s headlamps, and we could occasionally catch glimpses of the jagged, volcanic rock of the lava tube that was the Great Darkness, adorned with Venusian kelp and the creatures who lived there amongst the rocks and vegetation.

  I remembered that much myself: the walls of the Great Darkness had been alive in front of me. I saw anglerworms dangling their fish-shaped heads outward into the water, enticing the snaggle-mouthed puffers to come close enough to be speared by the poisoned lance of their tongues. I watched a wave of green painters undulate past me, the inky dye from their bodies leaving swirling trails of purple as they passed. Snorting shells, with their long spires and carapaces swirled with brilliant blues, yellows, and reds belched air as they made their way along the ledges of the Great Darkness. The shallow waters of the Always Sea teemed with life, everywhere. There were species unseen by any human to be discovered everywhere we looked and we could have spent days cataloging and describing them, but Avariel was intent only on going down into the blackness …

  Down, and down. I knew that Avariel would be starting to feel the pressure building against her flexible suit, which would be hardening against the weight of the water. The suit she wore was a hybrid: self-contained and powered only by Avariel’s legs, but also a miniature “vessel” that would allow her to reach depths that an individual diver would not be able to reach. Because for religious reasons, the shreeliala had refused to allow us to probe the Great Darkness with remote-controlled vehicles, we had no idea of the actual depth of the lava tube though indirect estimates suggested that it was no more than eight hundred meters.

  The hissing of the rebreather would be loud in her ears, and the canyon wall she followed down became stripped of the kelp, which needed the faint, cloud-shielded sunlight that was mostly nonexistent below seventy-five to one hundred meters. Instead, the rocks were dotted with the gray-white tubes of puff-worms and the lacy, swollen cells of prison-crabs, laden with the bones of the fish they’d snagged with their long, prehensile tails.

  “I’m at 210 meters,” Avariel said, her voice becoming distorted in pitch as the rebreather added more helium and neon to the air she was breathing. I knew why she mentioned it: that’s where I’d had my accident, where she’d been forced to abandon the quest the last time. She was well away from the canyon wall now, the lights on her mask illuminating only dark, empty water. She wasn’t going to repeat my “mistake.”

  The dive meter display showed 280 meters when it happened.

  “There’s something …” they heard Avariel say. “Coming up from below. Lights …” In the viewscreen, the camera swayed as she looked down, and we saw a swarm of firefly lights, green and cold, swirling below like a flock of phosphorescent birds, and rising, rising as they grew larger. “I can feel them …”

  The sense of something approaching … then the pain, the terrible pain that sent me whirling into unconsciousness …

  “Avariel,” I said, leaning over Patrick’s console, “be careful …”

  “I don’t believe—” she began, but the lights rushed inward: too bright, too huge, and the camera view tumbled wildly as they heard Avariel cry out. “No! Don’t …”

  Then the screens all went dark at once, the readouts went to flat-line, and there was only the hiss of static in the speakers. “Avariel!” I shouted, though I knew already that it was too late. “Avariel!”

  Silence. I heard Mikhail cursing at his console. “I’m taking us down,” he said. “We’ll go and get her.”

  “No!” That was Hasalalo, its voice shrill through the bubbler. “That is not permitted. The Green Council forbids it. I forbid it.”

  “Fuck both you and the Green Council!” Mikhail ranted. “We have to do something. Patrick, give me her last position.”

  I put my hand on Mikhail’s shoulder; he pushed it away. “You can’t,” I told him. Patrick hadn’t moved, staring at all of us. “Avariel knew the risks.”

  “And last time, she brought you back,” Mikhail answered.

  “Not all of me,” I answered. “Some of me is still down there. She knew the risks,” I repeated. He stared at me. He cursed again, punching a closed fist on the console. A screen sparked in static at the punishment. Then he let his hands drop to his side.

  We waited, hovering above the Great Darkness, until an hour after her air should have run out. Then, in furious silence and grief, we headed back to Undersea Port.

  I stood at the shore of the Always Sea. The rain was a bare drizzler, fat drops falling from scudding, gray-black clouds as the wind frothed the tips of the low rollers coming in. Lightning from a storm near the horizon licked bright tongues into the sea. I’d left the rainshield behind in my room; if Venus wanted me to get wet, I’d oblige her and allow it to happen. I imagined the gods of Venus spitting on me from the eternal cloud banks, and laughing when one of the droplets hit me. I stared out toward the Great Darkness, half-believing I could see the darkness of it even though I knew that was impossible.

  Avariel’s body never came back up. I imagined her bones, down there with all the others. With a few of mine, as well.

  I heard the scrape of a flippered foot on the rocks and the hiss of a bubbler behind me, and glanced over my shoulder to see Hasalalo there. It stood alongside me, silent except for the noise of the bubbler. “The Green Council has closed the Great Darkness to all further human exploration,” it said. “None of your kind will ever do what Avariel attempted.”

  It was staring at me. I took a long breath, then plunged my hand into my pocket. I pulled out the stomach-stone I’d taken from the pit. It shone in the rain and the diffuse light from the eternally clouded sky: marbled blue highlights in a swirling, orange-red matrix—gorgeous, and oddly heavy. “Here,” I told it. “You wanted to see the truth hiding in the stone. Here it is.” I took its hand and put the finished piece on its scaled flesh, the polished surface glinting like a wet jewel.

  Hasalalo’s bubbler burbled as it stared, prodding the stone with a webbed finger. Its huge eyes looked up. “There was great beauty inside,” it said. “How could the Lights-in-Water not love such a thing if they could see it, if someone gave it to them?”

  I nodded. I thought it would keep the stone, but Hasalalo handed the stomach-stone back to me; I put it in my pocket to nestle with the other stones: Avariel. Venus. The last time …

  Neither of us said anything for a time, just watching the rain-pocked rollers coming in off the Always Sea. “You’ll be leaving,” Hasalalo said finally.

  I shook my head. “No,” I told it. “I think I’ll stay here for a while. Maybe you were right about seeing truth. I’ve always moved around. For once, I think I’ll try staying long enough to see what’s underneath the surface. Maybe I’ll even figure out what the Lights-in-Water are.”

  Hasalalo seemed to contemplate that. “You will live longer than me,” it said finally, slowly. “When I die, if you’re still here …” It stopped. It was staring out at the misty horizon, where the Great Darkness lay.

  “If I’m still here …?” I prodded.

  “They will throw my body into the Pit. After the wrigglers have taken my flesh, would you come for my stomach-stones? Would you find the truth inside them? And would you …”

  Hasalalo didn’t finish, but it looked out toward the Great Darkness through the r
ain, and I knew what it wanted. I nodded. “I will,” I told it. “I promise.”

  ELEANOR ARNASON

  Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the nineties, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr., Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her other books are Ring of Swords and Tomb of the Fathers, and a chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, which includes the eponymous novella, plus an interview with her and a long essay. Her most recent book is a collection, Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo finalist in 2000. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Here she takes us along with a National Geographic safari headed out of Venusport to the wildest part of the Venusian Outback in search of dramatic wildlife footage, and where they find something much more dramatic than they had anticipated.

  Ruins

  ELEANOR ARNASON

  OF COURSE, THE STORY BEGAN IN A LOW DIVE IN VENUSPORT, in the slums up on the hillside above the harbor. The proper town was below them: grid streets with streetlights, solid, handsome concrete houses, and apartment blocks. The people in the apartments—middle-class and working folks with steady jobs—had their furniture volume-printed in one of the city’s big plants. The rich folks in their houses patronized custom printing shops, where they could get any kind of furniture in any style.

  The rich man in his castle,

  The poor man at his gate,

  God printed out the both of them

  And ordered their estate

  Not that it mattered up on the hill. The people here scraped by without regular jobs that could be relied on. There were always layoffs, when construction was cut back or the equipment from Earth did not arrive. If there were God-given rules for their lives, they didn’t know them.

  The bar Ash was in had beat-up, previously owned chairs and tables. A dehumidifier–heating unit glowed against one wall because it was winter, and the usual winter rains fell heavily outside. It wasn’t cold that was a problem. No place on Venus was really cold, except the tops of a few tall mountains. But the damp could get in your bones.

  Ash sat in a corner, her back against a wall. On the table in front of her was a glass of beer and a tablet. She was playing solitaire on the tablet. The game occupied her mind just enough to keep out old memories but left her with attention for the bar. It could be dangerous on payday nights, when people were flush and drunk, or after big layoffs, when people were angry and spending their last money. Tonight it was mostly empty.

  The guy who walked in—there was always someone walking in at the start of a story—did not belong. He was short and neatly dressed, with a fancy vest full of pockets; and his head was shaved, except for a few tufts of bright blue hair. It was the kind of haircut that required upkeep. Most people in Hillside didn’t bother.

  He stopped at the bar and spoke to the bartender, who nodded toward Ash. The man bought a glass of wine, which was a mistake, as he would find when he tasted it, then walked over.

  She had no chance of winning the current game and turned the tablet off.

  “Hong Wu,” he said in introduction. “I’m an editor with National Geographic.”

  “Yes?” She nodded toward the chair opposite. The man sat down, took a sip of his wine, and made a face. “You are Ash Weatherman.”

  “Yes.”

  “We want to do a story about the megafauna on Venus, and we want to hire you.”

  “The story’s been done,” Ash said.

  “We think another look at the megafauna is worth it. We did a thousand stories about wild animals in Africa, until they were gone. People could never get enough of elephants and lions. They still can’t. Look at zoos.”

  She had grown up on National Geographic videos: all the lost wilderness of Earth, the charismatic megafauna of land and ocean. Most had been mammals, of course, and near relatives to humanity. Nothing on Venus was as closely related although pretty much everyone agreed that life on Venus had come from Earth, most likely via a meteorite that hit Earth a glancing blow, then landed on the inner planet, bringing Terran organisms scraped up in the first collision. Geologists thought they had found the crater on Earth and the final resting place on Venus. Both craters were eroded and filled in, not visible on the planetary surface. The great plain of Ishtar and something whacking big in Greenland.

  There were people who thought it had happened twice, with the second meteorite bringing organisms from a later era; and they had found another pair of craters. But whatever had happened was long ago, and the organisms that came to Venus were single-celled. They had their own evolutionary history, which had ended in a different place, with no cute, furry mammals.

  “The fauna here are certainly big enough,” she said out loud. “Though I don’t know how charismatic they are.” She tapped her tablet, and a new game of solitaire appeared. “What do you know about me?”

  “You grew up in Hillside, graduated from high school here, and got a degree in the history of evolutionary theory at Venusport College. According to the police, you were involved with a student anarchist group but did nothing illegal.

  “You worked in a printing plant while you were in college and after—until your photography began to sell. For the most part, you do advertising. Fashion, such as it is on Venus, furniture and real estate, and nature shots for the tourism industry. On the side, you do your own work, which is mostly images of the Venusian outback. That work is extraordinary. We have our own first-rate videographer and a thoughtful journalist, but we think it would be interesting to have a Venusian perspective.”

  Interesting that they’d seen her photos. They had shown at a small gallery downtown: 3-D blowups on the walls and a machine in back to print copies with a signature: Ashley Weatherman, 2113. She’d made some money. People safe in Venusport liked to have the Venusian wilderness on their walls: cone-shaped flowers two meters tall, brilliant yellow or orange; amphibianoids that looked—more or less—like giant crocodiles; and little, rapid, bipedal reptiloids.

  “You’re going to need someone to organize your safari,” Ash said. “Do you have anyone?”

  “We thought we’d ask you.”

  “Arkady Volkov. You’re going to want to go to Aphrodite Terra. That’s where the best megafauna are, and you won’t want to deal with any corporations. Most of Ishtar Terra is company land. Believe me, they protect it.”

  Hong Wu nodded. “Rare-earth mining and time-share condos.”

  “Arkady knows the territory,” Ash said. “I’ve worked with him before.”

  Hong Wu nodded a second time. “We know. The police here say he’s reputable even though he comes from Petrograd.”

  The last Soviet Socialist Republic, which remained here on Venus long after the collapse of the USSR, an enclave of out-of-date politics on the larger of the two Venusian continents. She liked Arkady, even though he was a Leninist. The heart hath its reasons that reason knoweth not. “Are you willing to hire him?”

  “Yes,” Hong Wu said.

  The rest of the conversation was details. Hong Wu left finally. Ash ordered another beer.

  The bartender asked, “What was that about?”

  “Work.”

  “He looked like a petunia.”

  “He is an employer, and we will be respectful.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The bartender grinned, showing metal teeth.

  She finished the beer and walked home through winter rain, not hurrying. Her parka was waterproof, and the streets were covered with mud that had washed down from eroded hillsides. Half the streetlights were out. It would be easy to slip on the badly lit, uneven surface. She hated getting muddy. Even more, she hated looking vulnerable.

&nb
sp; The buildings she passed were concrete and low: row houses for families and barracks for single workers. Graffiti crawled over them, most of it dark and slow moving. Here and there were tags written in more expensive spray that jittered and sparkled. “REVOLUTION NOW,” one said in glowing red letters. “F U, F U, F U,” another said in flashing yellow. The tags wouldn’t last downtown, where the ambiance cops would cover them, but here—

  There were shanties and tents in the supposedly empty lots, mostly hidden by vegetation. You could see them if you knew how to look. Some folks did not like living in barracks, and some didn’t have the money to pay bed-rent.

  She turned a corner next to a lot full of tall, feathery pseudograss. In daylight, it would have been deep green, edged with purple. Now it was as black as the graffiti on the nearest building. In the street ahead, a pack of piglike amphibianoids nosed around a Dumpster. Mostly not dangerous, in spite of their impressive tusks and claws. Ash paused. The matriarch of the pack eyed her for a moment, then grunted and lumbered away. The rest followed, leaving heaps of dung.

  Her place was past the Dumpster: a two-floor row house. A light shone over the door, making it possible for her to see the land scorpion resting on the step. More than anything else, it looked like the ancient sea scorpions of Earth: broad, flat, segmented, and ugly. Instead of swimming paddles, it had many legs. This one was dull green and as long as her foot. Most likely it wasn’t venomous. The toxic species advertised the fact with bright colors. Nonetheless, she stepped on it firmly, hearing the crack of its exoskeleton breaking, then scraped her boot on the edge of the step.

  She unlocked the door and yelled a greeting to the family on the first floor. Bangladeshi. The smell of their curries filled the house; and if she was lucky, they invited her to dinner. Tonight she was too late. Ash climbed the stairs and unlocked another door. Lights came on. Baby, her pet pterosaur, called, “Hungry.”