“Tumblers,” said Vinnie. “Harmless. But if you see something that looks the same, only light purple, that’s not. A fungal mimic. Nasty. Beam it if it’s closing in, let them go if not.”
“OK,” said Mazith. “Uh, I don’t get a lot of practice with small arms usually …”
“You’ll get plenty this trip,” said Vinnie, deliberately misunderstanding her concern. “Don’t worry.”
“So how does this special communication work?” asked Kelvin. “We didn’t have any back in the day. Are you communicating all the time? You know, your sib sees and hears what you see kind of thing?”
“No,” said Mazith. “It’s not that straightforward. We sense each other all the time, but to communicate takes a lot of concentration. If it works, then I can speak through … Lyman’s mouth. And he can speak through mine.”
“So where’s Lyman?” asked Vinnie.
“Uh, he’s on the Rotarua,” replied Mazith. “I … um … drew the short … the straw for the planetside assignment.”
“Rotarua?” asked Kelvin. “That’s a battle cruiser, isn’t it? I thought the treaty limited visiting warships to nothing bigger than a heavy cruiser?”
“Apparently under the treaty terms she is a heavy cruiser,” said Mazith easily. “Besides, we aren’t exactly visiting, just a kind of touch and go. We were on patrol and got called in when the shuttle went down.”
“I see,” said Kelvin. She was lying about something, he thought, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what, or why. The business with the Rotarua was strange. If the battle cruiser had been in anything like a regular approach and orbit, he would have seen it on the traffic scans on the way down that morning, but nothing had shown up apart from the usual picket ships, familiar icons on the screen. A “touch-and-go” approach could mean anything from literally dropping a boat while en route to somewhere else, or a long, irregular orbit that might be designed to keep the ship off the scans of both traffic control and the picket ships, but still put the ship close enough once every Venusian day or so for a brief window to fire ordnance or otherwise conduct military operations.
But why would they want to do that, mused Kelvin …
As predicted, they reached the ranch just as the light faded, the cloud lowering and thickening into a dense fog, as it always did at nightfall. The lizard quickened its pace, keen to get into a warm huddle with its fellows, Vinnie having to hood it to slow it down long enough for the saddle-sore Kelvin and Mazith to dismount and hobble up into the ranch house, a high-stilted building constructed from gorretwood, the valuable fungus-resistant hard timber that only grew on the highest points of the plateau.
Vinnie opened the door with an old-fashioned bronze key in a massive bronze lock that would have suited a Terran house of four hundred years before. There was no one inside, but a note was on the table of the common room.
“Osgood is rounding up some strays,” said Vinnie. “And Jat’s gone on ahead to line up things with the Lepers.”
“How did she know to do that?” asked Kelvin. “I thought the Navy picked you up in town? And besides, since when has Jat done anything anyone asked her to?”
“The Navy did pick me up in town,” said Vinnie. “We’ve got a landline here now, at least for the dry season. I called and told Jat about the mission, and asked her to ask Osgood to go to the Lepers while she stayed back to look after the ranch.”
“Smart,” said Kelvin.
“Nah, she knew what I was doing. It just gave her an excuse to say no to my request, then do what I wanted while pretending not to.”
“You guys have a very complicated relationship.”
“And you don’t?”
“Uh, I don’t suppose there is any chance of a shower, sir?” asked Mazith. Her formerly nicely pressed camo uniform was looking quite bedraggled now, and was splashed with mud and speckled with multicolored spores.
“Through there,” said Vinnie. “It’ll be the last one for a while. Scrub off all your lotion, let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll apply the lichen. It’ll need overnight to get established. Kel, you can use the decon shower. You want to apply your own lichen? There’s a pot there.”
“Yeah, yeah,” grumbled Kelvin. “Can I borrow some clothes?”
“Help yourself,” said Vinnie. “I’ll see if they left us anything ready for dinner.”
They had, and after lizard steaks with breadfungus and several classic martinis, Kelvin felt considerably better than he had, despite the creeping sensation of the lichen spreading along his arms and legs, around his groin and armpits, and across his face. In a fit of whimsy, he’d applied antifungal ointment to constrain the lichen in tiger stripes, with some whiskers out either side of his nose. It was already coming into effect, judging from the sidelong glances from Mazith. Her facial lichen matched Vinnie’s spirals and she had adopted a lizard-skin singlet while retaining her camo trousers, all of it indicating an effort to fit in.
“Time you hit the hay, Lieutenant,” said Vinnie, when the clearing up was done. “We’ll be getting up at first light. Bunkhouse through the red door, take any bunk. See you in the morning.”
As soon as she’d left, Vinnie checked that the door was firmly shut before the clone siblings made each other another drink. Martini for Kelvin, and a local Venusian whisky for Vinnie.
“So what did smooth Captain O’Kazanis not tell us?” asked Kelvin. “And what’s Lieutenant Mazith lying about?”
“It could be just the kids are that important,” replied Vinnie. She paused and added thoughtfully, “If there are any kids …”
“Yeah,” said Kelvin. “A bunch of veep maggots take off by themselves? Sounds pretty thin to me. What happened to their bodyguards, conducting officers, babysitters …”
“I don’t get sending Mazith with us, either,” said Vinnie. “Why do we need instant comms? And how do we even know she is a special communicator?”
“You think she might not be?”
“I dunno. There’s something not right …”
“She’s definitely lying about something to do with the special communication,” said Kelvin.
“Yeah,” mused Vinnie. “Got to wonder why they’re using us, too, our megaskills notwithstanding. Pretty deniable, couple of old-timers from a pre–World Gov Navy.”
“Maybe the Navy wanted that yacht crashed and whatever indication they’ve got that it didn’t crash is bad news,” said Kelvin. “Negative kill. So they have to send an operator to make sure, only its being where it is, they need local help.”
“You got a suspicious mind, brother.”
“Could be, could be something else again,” said Kelvin. He scratched his head, frowned, and carefully inspected his fingernail. Itches on Venus were not to be ignored. “I figure whatever it is, it’ll come clear enough when we get close to the yacht.”
“I’ll have a word with Jat when we catch up with her,” said Vinnie. “Get her to watch over us, hey?”
“Will she do it?” asked Kelvin.
Vinnie gave him the look that had quelled many a junior officer and NCO.
“You ride the rear saddle tomorrow, too. Keep an eye on our young looie.”
It was raining when they set out the next day, warm rain that came down in sudden, smothering deluges that lasted a few minutes before easing off, only to deliver another barrage ten or fifteen minutes later. Within a few hours, they were into the Swamp proper, and finding a way with ground solid enough and water not too deep for the lizard became a full-time task for Vinnie, even with the tall bronze way markers that had been hammered deep into the soft ground to show the path to the Lepers’ territory.
Only a few kilometers into the Swamp, the treelike green caps gave way to a profusion of clusters of smaller fungi, in many different colors, some of them mobile. There were also rabbit-sized lizard-things, and insectoid critters that swam and jumped and chattered, and early on the afternoon of the first day, something shadowy and huge loomed ahead in the fog. Vinnie backed the l
izard off and all three of them readied their heat-beams before it continued on its way. There were only two known Venusian life-forms that big. One was a truly monstrous lizard and the other the Devil’s Tower, an ambulatory fungoid terror with fruiting spore-arms six meters long.
Two sweaty, itchy days later—broken by two long, hot nights spent on too-small islands that, while not actually underwater, were astonishingly damp—they came to what Vinnie described as the “Leper Trading Post,” a massive, cube-shaped pink fungus at least fifteen meters a side, that had either naturally solidified into something approaching concrete or been somehow encouraged to, with windows and doors and rooms excavated out of it as if it were a small, rocky hill.
“There’s nearly always a Leper here,” said Vinnie. “There’d better be. I can’t navigate us any farther into the swamp.”
“They live inside that fungus cube?” asked Mazith. She pointed to the top corner, where the fog was swirling and discolored, a strain of grey through its normal bilious green. “And is that smoke?”
“Yeah, they use fires for drying out, cooking, and so on,” said Vinnie. “Some of those dark purple, kind of chicken-shaped fungi burn slow, they’re good fuel. Smoke is good, it means someone’s home. Come on, let’s go say hello. Remember, they can look a bit … confronting. Keep your hand off your heat-beam.”
The Leper who came to the front door was extremely confronting. Kelvin considered Vinnie’s advice to keep his hand off his heat-beam very wise, for if he’d seen the Leper out in the swamp, he would have burned first and investigated afterward.
Still roughly human-shaped, with two arms and two legs, the Leper wore no clothes and was instead clad in outgrowths of different-colored and -textured fungus from its body. It—for it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman—had a hard, bulbous carapace over its chest and back, extending down to its thighs, and rippled, corded growths along its arms and legs. Its feet were now more like flippers, the big toes still visible, the other toes buried beneath layers of a rubbery, bright yellow fungus reminiscent of duck feet.
Its head was almost entirely encased in a fuzzy ball of many thousands of black filaments, which were in constant motion. Only its face was free of this growth, and even then only around the eyes, nostrils and a narrowed mouth, lips replaced by puffy orange growths.
“Howdy,” said the Leper, the depth and timbre of his voice indicating that he was probably male. Or had been male before his fungal transformation, which presumably went well beyond the visible indications. He raised his hand, which had only three fingers and a kind of wound-up sprung tendril in place of the pinkie.
“Afternoon,” said Vinnie. “I’m Vinnie, and this is my brother Kelvin, and an associate, Mazith. Maybe you heard about us coming through from Jat?”
“Oh, yeah, Jat said you’d be by. My name’s Theodore, by the way. You folk want a drink, bite to eat?”
“We’re kind of eager to keep going while there’s light, thank you all the same,” said Vinnie. “We’re going into the Roar to see if anyone’s survived a spaceship crash. Time might be kind of short if someone has.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” said Theodore. “You need a frogsled, too, and a driver?”
“We do,” said Vinnie. “I was hoping we could work something out with your people, maybe Terran credit, or lizard steaks or hides, whatever.”
“Sure, sure, we’ll take your credit,” said Theodore. “Or the Navy’s, I believe.”
“And I heard tell that you … your people—”
“Call us Lepers, that’s what we call ourselves,” said Theodore, with a laugh that set the filaments on his head all quivering.
“I heard tell that you Lepers can find your way in the Roar,” said Vinnie. She pulled out a paper map—map tablets died faster than treated paper would rot on Venus—unfolded it across her arm, and pointed out the likely position of the yacht. “We got a rough planetfall, probably give a search area of a couple of kilometers, but I sure as shit can’t navigate us there, not in the Roar.”
Theodore leaned close to look at the map and nodded.
“That’s not far off a marked trail, and it’s in the eye,” he said. “Tell you what, I might drive that frogsled for you folks myself. Been a while since I went into the Roar. Might be kind of unsettling going through the storm, but it’s very nice in the eye. Calm, and you get less cloud. I even saw the sky once.”
“Get out of here!” protested Kelvin. In thousands of shuttle flights, he’d never seen the sky. Not as such, not from anywhere even close to ground level. The cloud cover extended from twenty thousand meters to ground level, and never cleared. Not anywhere near Venusport, anyway.
“Just for half a minute or so, the clouds were sucked back by the storm,” said Theodore. “Beautiful! Now, you all lichened up, all parts? Because you don’t want to be on a frogsled with me, nor go into the Roar, unless you are. We don’t do conscription, you know. Got to volunteer to be a Leper. Like an ASAP, huh, Vinnie?”
“I never volunteered for anything,” said Vinnie sternly. “That was propaganda bullshit. We were made to be ASAPs. Variation D12 of only six clone lines, most of us Kelvin Kelvins or Oscar Goodsons.”
“Well, we’re honest about the volunteering,” said Theodore. “Truth is, it don’t work out unless it’s voluntarily. Fungus grows wrong otherwise, don’t know why, but that’s what happens. So if you get to be interested, just let me know.”
“Will do,” mumbled Kelvin, with something like a nod from Mazith. Vinnie didn’t answer.
“When was Jat here, by the way?” asked Vinnie. “Did she say where she was going?”
Theodore laughed.
“She was kind of here, then she wasn’t,” he replied. “Yesterday. Dunno where she went, or even how she was traveling. Didn’t see a lizard.”
“That’s Jat,” said Kelvin. Annoying as hell but often useful. He hoped she was going to be around. The more he saw of Lieutenant Mazith, the more he doubted she was a straightforward special communicator, and if she wasn’t a communicator, then what was she?
“Let’s go get on the sled,” said Theodore. “Got a bunch of frogs raring to go, we should make good time.”
The frogsled was a kind of punt drawn by four of the jumping Venusian batrachian analogues that were similar to Terran frogs, being a nice bright green with big back legs for jumping and smaller ones at the front. They were also the size of small hippos and on closer inspection they turned out to have hard carapaces and an additional set of vestigial legs, so the comparison was not very scientific. When harnessed to a frogsled, they moved the vehicle in a series of jerking, sliding, bucking movements that Kelvin had always found horribly like a spacecraft about to suffer a catastrophic thruster explosion.
The first day’s travel was relatively uneventful, at least by the standards of the Swamp. For a while, Kelvin thought that Theodore was changing direction erratically, just for the fun of alarming his passengers, but after some careful observation he recognized that the Leper was avoiding potential dangers, and not just danger to the humans, but also the other way around, where their passage might disrupt the careful balance of the Swamp’s ecosystem. This included taking a long diversion around a huge mass of early stage breadfungus that would have been torn apart by the frogsled and not come to maturity, depriving many of the higher life-forms of their sustenance.
They had to sleep on the sled that night, no islands being in evidence, with the frogs circled round and two of them on watch at all times. Toward dawn Kelvin woke Theodore to point out something he didn’t recognize, a slow-moving luminous carpet of something that was either a fungus or a gestalt entity of tiny insects that mimicked the look of spores, floating across the water.
Theodore knew it, and swam around cursing while he quickly harnessed the frogs.
“Glowpile,” he explained, as they started out again, the frogs swimming rather than jumping, taking it slow. “Absorbs everything in its path, spits what it doesn’t want out
the back. Highly resistant to heat-beams, chemicals, and the defensive spores we use. But at least it’s slow and we can get out of its way.”
When they stopped for breakfast on a welcome islet of rare rock, Mazith suddenly stopped chewing and her eyes went blank for half a minute. Kelvin watched her carefully, presuming that he was witnessing a communication from her telepathic sibling. Which meant a message from the battle cruiser.
When her eyes focused again and she started chewing, Kelvin asked her what that communication had been.
“Just routine,” she said. “Like a radio check. They want to know if we’re getting close.”
“We are,” said Theodore. “Can’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?” asked Mazith.
“The Roar,” answered Theodore, the tendrils on his head making a waving motion, all in the same direction, though the ever-present fog was so thick there was no knowing what he was pointing out that way.
“I’m not … sure,” said Mazith. She tilted her head, listening intently. “There is something.”
They could all hear it, now that they were listening. It was slight, for the moment, like a faint clearing of the throat noise overheard through a closed window, but constant.
“It will get louder,” said Theodore. “Much louder.”
He was right. The noise got much louder and louder still with every kilometer they zigzagged and backtracked and meandered toward the Roar.
With the noise, there later came a breath of wind, welcome at first, simply because it made a change. The fog moved and shifted, and after a few more hours transformed into scudding cloud at surface level, sometimes even breaking up enough so that they could see more than the twenty meters they’d got used to in the other parts of the Swamp.
This too, was welcome at first. But the wind speed continued to increase as they lurched and skipped onward, soon drenching them in muddy spray mixed with spores, with the frogsled making a crabwise course, constantly having to be angled diagonally across the wind, for it was impossible to go against it. The frogs were not jumping now but rather crawling and paddling, their pace slowed to something not much better than a human could wade.
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