“But the tricky part was reaching Equilateral here. The station wasn’t in position for rendezvous, so all the ships had to linger in orbit for two days until calculations could be made.” And here he smiles his smug D’Yquem smile. “If they had one of my devices, they could have solved the problem in half an hour.”
“How was I rescued? I was nowhere near the ships.”
“We had to go back for you three days later. One ship was able to find dry land again and set down. Fortunately the Lens still stands. You were quite a mess, unconscious when you weren’t delirious. But even Tuttle insisted that you had to be found.”
“So the Lens—”
“Minimal damage, frankly. With a bit of work, it would be ready for transmissions from Earth on schedule.” D’Yquem smiles. “Of course, it is now located in the middle of an inland sea that will soon, Rostov predicts, become an ice field in the new Nightside of Venus.”
Jor thinks of Abdera, adrift in the fleet of skiffs. “What about the Venerians?”
“They were able to ride out the wave, as apparently they have done many times in the past.”
Jor absorbs this news. “One more thing,” D’Yquem says. “I regret not telling you before, but I wasn’t sure until I had time to talk with Rostov again, and to examine the past—”
“Your injuries must have been severe.”
He raises his bandaged hands. “It will be months before I can lift a glass again.
“Abdera’s fling with me was deliberate. She went after me because of reloquere!” He can surely see the confusion on Jor’s face. “The Venerians not only take apart their physical world before the Sunset of Time … they also dissolve their relationships. We’ve already seen the clans and fleets realigning. We shouldn’t be surprised that it extends right down to … boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Jor is in no mood to argue. Though it is close to comforting. “She could have told me.”
“Yes,” D’Yquem says, “but remember how long-lived the Venerians are … how sophisticated they are in their choices and actions. I think she wanted you in a … a dangerous frame of mind. Angry. Driven. Eager to prove yourself.”
“Why?”
And here D’Yquem smiles with what might be genuine warmth, as if acknowledging a difficult truth.
“So you would be tempted to be a hero.”
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born science-fiction author. His work has been translated into sixteen different languages. He has published some fifty short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and Campbell awards. He’s the author of the Xenowealth series, consisting of Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, and The Apocalypse Ocean. His short fiction has been collected in Nascence and Tides from the New Worlds. His most recent novels are Arctic Rising and a sequel, Hurricane Fever; his most recent collection is Mitigated Futures. Much of his short work has recently been made available as Kindle editions.
In the harrowing story that follows, he shows us that some atrocities seem to repeat themselves down through history—even on another world.
Pale Blue Memories
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
1.
I GRABBED THE ARMS OF MY ACCELERATION CHAIR AS WE spun, our silver bullet of a rocket ship vomiting debris and air into the cold night of Venus’s stratosphere. Commander Heston James, Sr., flung himself from control panel to control panel, trying to regain control of our craft, but the Nazi missile had done its nasty work well.
From a distance, the great pearly orb of Venus had been a comfort to us. Our exciting destination. A place that beckoned adventure.
We would land, for our country. And strike a great blow against the German Reich, proving that the war machine of the United States of America was more powerful. The great Space Race that grew out of the guttering stalemate of the Great War saw Nazi moon-bases and stations matched by Allied forces in the final frontier. Now the race was on to claim a planet.
But the sneaky Nazi bastards, unable to beat us to the sister planet’s surface, shot us out of the sky with a missile that had boosted behind us from Earth, hiding in our rocket ship’s wake until right as we deorbited.
“Charles!” Commander James shouted at me, looking back over his shoulder. “Do we have communications?”
I’d been flipping switches and listening to static for the last ten minutes of terror. The faint, steady, reassuring pip from Earth was nowhere to be found. And our tumbling meant it would never be found until we stabilized.
Or it could mean all our antennas were snapped clean off.
“Charles!”
I shook my head at him. “No, Commander. Everything is off-line.”
In radio silence, we continued to fall out of the sky.
Commander James strained against the g-forces snapping at us to continue working his panels, fighting for control of his ship all the way down. A hero to the last breath.
Out of one of the small portholes I watched the expanse of white clouds beneath us spin past again and again.
All this was a punishment, I thought to myself, as the blood continued to rush up against the inside of my head and dizzy me. Like Daedalus, I’d flown too high and been burned. Now I was falling.
And falling.
People from my kind of family didn’t end up becoming astronauts. My kind of family had aunts and uncles who had to drink from the other fountains and couldn’t order stuff from the front.
My dad came from Jamaica, towing behind the rest of his family. They came looking for jobs and ended up working out in the Illinois countryside. White folk could tell Dad wasn’t white, but they weren’t sure what exactly he was, due to his kinky hair and skin that browned when he worked outside too long.
Dad said that back home they called him “high yellow,” which meant he was mixed race but looked more white than black. Folk up North were more uneasy about the idea of mixed-race people. In some ways, that made it harder for Dad. He was a living, walking example of miscegenation. A child of a white father and a black mother.
If you were one or the other, in America, he said, everyone knew exactly how to treat you. But being stuck somewhere in the middle left him pulled in directions that I couldn’t fathom.
He married a white woman: an even greater sin. We wouldn’t have been able to do that in the South, but in the North, as long as we kept to ourselves and didn’t “flaunt” it, people pretended it didn’t exist as long as my mother and father didn’t go out together.
And as for me, I took after my mother.
I remember sitting in front of the window, looking at my reflection, trying to get my father’s comb to stick in my hair like it did in his. But instead it would just slide out of my straggly, fine strands and fall to the floor.
My fair-skinned mother would find me crying in front of the mirror and ask me what was wrong. I never had the words to explain to her, and that would sometimes upset her more.
When I was five, my father sat me down. “I want to tell you where you came from,” he told me, his face serious, his gray eyes piercing my fidgety five-year-old soul. “Because it’s only once you know where we are from that you can understand who you really are.”
I nodded, like I understood the wisdom he was dropping on me. Mostly I was excited to be let into this circle of trust he was drawing around us. Because these were things we had to keep close to us, as if they were horrible secrets. And yet, in fact, it was just the truth about how we’d gotten where we were.
Sometimes simple truth was radical.
“Your forefathers come from the Ivory Coast, in far-off Africa. From across the seas,” he told me.
He taught me their names, and the name of the tribe his forefathers had once belonged to. “I once knew the dances, and some of the words, as they were passed on to me from my grandfather,” he told me with sad eyes. “But I have forgotten them. But I have not forgotten where I came from. And you can’t either.
Your skin is pale, son, and that will be to your advantage in this world. You might go on to do great things here. But you have to know who we are.”
“Will we go back?” I asked, excited.
He looked at me for a long time. “I don’t know if there is a back to go back to, son. We live here. It is what we know. And what we need to know is how best to survive, and more importantly, thrive. Because a man should be able to live anywhere in the world and not suffer, do you understand? This is our home because we are here. And we are with each other.”
I don’t know if he believed it. But at five, looking up at his broad shoulders, the lesson embedded itself deep in me and took root.
Thirteen years later, I would be flying trainer aircraft and pushing myself to beat everyone around me. More kills, more daring stunts. I’d been training in languages while in school but left to help fight the Great War and Hitler’s minions.
I’d heard about the squadron of negro-only fighters in the sky, heard that bombers were asking for the Red Tails because of their record of flying close and protecting.
The Red Tails were breaking records in their section of the sky. I was secretly doing it over here. And one day I’d reveal myself. And it would be known that I was as good as any other pilot.
Only I was a ghost. A shadow person. A secret with my one drop of different blood.
And now I, Charles Stewart with my mixed blood, would die on the surface of Venus in a spectacular crash and no one would ever know what I’d truly accomplished, would they? No one would know I’d been as good as any white astronaut, and they hadn’t even known about me in their midst.
I’d flown too high.
No. That was the blood squeezing against my brain. I’d flown high. I was proud to have flown high!
We plunged through the thick clouds of Venus, and for a brief second I saw lush green vegetation and wide expanses of ocean.
Commander James cut himself free of his restraints, slamming into a bulkhead and cutting his head open.
“Keep calling out elevation, Davis,” he shouted back at the navigator, Tad Davis.
Tad began shouting out the numbers as we fell. Heston pulled Shepard Jefferson out of his chair and dragged him back on hands and knees deeper into the heart of the craft. I could hear banging and swearing.
Eric Smith, our geologist and general scientist, grabbed my arm from his position strapped in on my left. “I know communications is down, but patch me in anyway.” He stared out of the porthole. “I’m going to broadcast what I can make out as we go down, for the benefit of whoever might hear something.”
The ears of the world might be straining to hear us. And Eric was a scientist to the last. I linked his microphone to the radio. “You’re on, if we’re able to transmit,” I told him through gritted teeth.
“We’re spinning wildly,” Eric narrated, “but I’m sure I can see jungle out on the land we’re far above. There are great oceans in between the main sections of land we’re over, and there appear to be cloudbursts all around us. This is a rainy world. A wet world. A humid world.”
He continued on in that manner as the details grew, and Eric described mountains rising toward us. A lake. Highlands, thick with jungle.
I had a wristband with a cyanide pill in it, in case things went bad. I idly wondered if it made sense to take it before we hit the ground. I didn’t want to feel the moment of impact.
“Shep: hold on!” Commander James shouted from back behind us.
We slammed in our restraints as the craft suddenly decelerated. For a moment I was cheered. We’d gotten the rocket back on and would descend on our tail in fire and triumph to the surface of this new world.
But that wasn’t it, we still yawed and swung. The descent was slow, but the thundering roar of the rocket was absent.
“Parachutes!” Tad said. “They got the emergency parachutes open.”
A wall of green flung itself at the portholes. My chair broke loose from its bolts and I spun across the cabin in a sudden cartwheel as the rocket ship struck trees and marsh in a grinding screech.
2.
THE AIR OUTSIDE WAS THICK WITH MOISTURE AND THE SMELLS of exotic, alien plants. Dark purple fronds filled the steep hills all around us, and just a few miles ahead stony mountains jutted up into the air.
We’d been just split seconds away from dashing ourselves against them, I realized.
All five of us gathered outside to walk the hull at Commander James’s insistence. “We need to know how bad the damage is,” he said.
I just wanted to stand outside. We’d been cooped in a metal tube for almost an entire month, eating pills and squeezing food out of tubes. I wanted to just stand in the open copse created when the rocket ship slammed through the palmlike fronds.
But we all nodded and followed orders.
“How bad is it, Shep?” Heston asked, once we’d all walked a circuit around the silvered ship. We’d all paused near the water tanks that had saved our lives. Had the Nazi missile struck anywhere else, we likely would have died right then and there.
“We didn’t just lose water,” Shepard reported. “We vented fuel, and the hull probably won’t survive taking us back up into orbit. The stress of firing the engine might well just cause the whole thing to crumple.”
Heston looked thoughtful. Thinking about all the variables. Working on a plan of action. He looked out over the vegetation around us with a grimace. “Then we’re not here to explore and return. The mission parameters have just changed. We’re here to survive until we can be rescued by another mission. Stewart: where are we with comms?”
I looked up from staring at massive yellow lily pad–like leaves on a nearby plant. “I sent out distress signals the moment we knew the missile was there, sir. And all the way down. But the equipment’s broken. I can look at the spare parts, see what I can cobble up. But I can’t do anything until Shepard gets the power back on.”
Heston turned back to Shepard. “Shep?”
“I’ll get to work on it. A couple hours?” Shep wiped his hands, then jumped back up to the doors and hauled himself into our broken ship.
“In the meantime,” Heston said, “I need you and Eric to take some bottles and hunt for a clean source of water. Eric: get what you need to test the water, make sure it’s safe.”
“Yes, sir!” we said, and I moved to help Eric get a couple of machetes and some large containers.
We’d landed in the high foothills near a natural plateau. The ground was muddy, and at first the closest thing we found to water was several pools of swampy muck as we chopped through the jungle.
Eric was quiet, no doubt as a result of being a bit shook-up. But I was also out of sorts myself. I was happy to be by his side, though. A bookish type, Eric was the crew member I’d always liked the most. Of all the crew, he had yet to make a random comment about Italians, Jews, Poles, Blacks, or Hispanics that left me secretly angry but outwardly carefully neutral.
I could relax a little near him, not expecting some sudden verbal explosion that would wing me.
The heat and humidity caused me to sweat heavily as we hacked our way onward, and I pulled my long-sleeved shirt off to wrap it around my waist.
“I’d keep that on,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
Eric pointed the machete at fist-sized black marks on the feathered leaves of nearby fronds. “They’re not exactly like mosquitoes, but they’re giant bugs. Probably because of the denser air, I imagine.”
I pulled my shirt back on. “Will a shirt stop a supermosquito?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t know, but maybe it’ll help.” There were large gnats, clouds of which burst out from the ground like jittery dark thunderclouds when we disturbed them.
Eric perked up after a while and began examining the vegetation, trying to pin down what it might be analogous to back on Earth. “Very Mesozoic,” he kept saying. And all I knew about that was that it had something to do with dinosaurs.
We stopped
at the edge of two fetid pools of water while Eric examined them. “Stagnant,” he pronounced, and we kept on.
The ground grew muddier, but Eric found a ridge of rock to scramble on that poked over the worst of it, and we began to skirt over the jungle. Occasionally he stopped to draw landmarks on a pad of paper. “There’s no sun, or stars, or compass we can use here,” he said. “We have to be careful not to get lost.”
He also stopped twice to make quick sketches of brightly colored, long-tailed, birdlike creatures that burst out of the treetops and glided through the air.
Eventually we took a break near another flat plain by more swamp. By now, Eric was grinning, our predicament taking a backseat to his scientific wonderment at the flora and fauna of an alien world. “There are tracks here. There seem to be large animals. And we should be able to follow them to a source of water,” he said.
I sat with my back to him, looking toward the tall rocks we’d scaled down from, and took a long sip of water from my canteen.
And it was then that I felt Eric’s back stiffen straight. “Charles,” he hissed.
“Yes?”
“Don’t. Make. A. Move.”
The ground thudded. And again. I looked oh-so-slowly over my shoulder. A ten-foot-tall, six-legged beast with dappled green hide and a fiercely reptilian face hissed at us.
But that wasn’t what made my stomach clench. A thin-limbed man, with skin so pale it looked almost transparent, stood up on leather stirrups and pointed what was unmistakably a long-barreled weapon at us.
From farther down the trail, three more mounted Venusians plodded along, their long rifles aimed right at us.
“They’re bipedal,” Eric breathed. “And humanoid. How graceful!”
“They have weapons,” I murmured.
“This must be some form of parallel evolution. This is the sister planet, and these are sister peoples,” Eric said to me out of the corner of his mouth. “Or maybe we all came from the same organisms …”
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