Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  But, I reminded myself, Nazism was purified European colonialism. A heady alcohol to the weak beer of American colonialism that was somewhat more survivable; despite the lynchings, there’d been no total ethnic cleansing. So I’d joined the world war and fought, and to my bitterness, seen the war continue on.

  Seen the war spread even into outer space as we raced Hitler to other worlds.

  No, it would not leave me sleepless to do what I planned, I thought, as I woke the overseer to tell them about the knife.

  We woke, hours later, to the sounds of human screams. The Nazis hung bound from three poles. Outside we found Hans slumped forward, dead, my crude knife sticking out of his neck.

  The other pair wailed and wept as the colorful leeches sucked and tore into their skin. The overseers had questioned the other Venusians about knife-waving humans, and they pointed to the corner of the common house. One human looked like the other to them, and I’d moved my small group away from the Nazis, who were wearing our old clothes. I’d told Maet to sleep somewhere else.

  “We take an airship today if the chance is there,” I said to my fellow remaining humans. “They’ll all be focused on other things right now.”

  6.

  THE NAZIS SCREWED THINGS UP FOR US. I’D HAD TO USE MY homemade knife, and now I didn’t have anything to cut the airship’s bowline with. So I stood by the tie-down point as casually as I could, a large sack of grain on my shoulders, and loosened the massive knot until it slipped free.

  I left the line loose around the great sand-screw sunk ten feet into the ground. From a distance, I hoped it would look like it was still tied.

  And then I nonchalantly returned after dropping the grain off.

  I could hear Shepard swearing from inside as I loped back into the cabin. Two-thirds of the cargo had been shuffled out by the unloading crew. Six Venusians were inside with us, and one overseer lounged against the wall of the cargo bay, watching the unloading, shouting and smacking us with his club when he deemed us too slow.

  Eric leaned over. “Do we wait for everyone to leave with their cargo?”

  “Now,” I hissed.

  “And the Venusians?”

  “Once we’re off the ground they can jump out if they want to stay, or join us if they want freedom,” I said.

  We’d wanted a few more days to plan the exact attack on an airship, but we had our chance. Normally several overseers stood inside to watch us. Normally they were more vigilant. But they’d gotten their troublemakers this morning. They were sated from the violence and punishment.

  Eric and I attacked the overseer from each side. We wrapped a ripped-open water sack around his head to muffle his cries. We yanked him beneath bags of grain and I crushed his neck with the heel of my foot repeatedly until the soles of my feet struck metal.

  Shepard ran into the empty control room and triggered the helium-release valve, reversing the flow from the pressurized tanks.

  The hiss was loud, and I glanced down the bay. No armies of overseers swarmed us yet though they were turning, their large, dark eyes opening in realization.

  “Fellow people,” I announced to the whole cargo bay. “We are stealing this ship. And if you would like to flee with us, you are welcome. If not, run for the ground!”

  Two Venusians ran, jumping out of the bay. It was already three feet off the ground. They rolled on the grass, and for their loyalty were treated with kicks from enraged overseers.

  One of them grabbed the lip of the open bay, struggling to get aboard. I kicked at his hands as we continued to rise into the air. He looked up at me, hanging from the edge, such hatred and astonishment in his eyes.

  I stomped his fingers until he screamed and let go. He dropped ten feet to the ground, his legs folding awkwardly under him.

  The other Venusians turned and ran back for their rifles as we rose higher. The violent lasers cracked and sizzled the air, but I ran forward with Shepard to jam the engines full on. When they droned to life the airship surged away even faster.

  Later, I walked back to the open bay and looked back at the stone towers of Kish as they receded in the distance. We passed over the swamps and marshes that surrounded it. Something with a giant, saurapodian neck peeked its head out of the treetops and bellowed at us.

  We were a craft of free people.

  7.

  WHEN MY SON TURNED FIVE, I SAT HIM DOWN. “IT IS TIME TO tell you who you really are, and where you really came from,” I said.

  I told him that he was from the tribe of humanity, from the world of Earth.

  “Where is that?” he asked.

  “Far above the veil of gray.” I pointed at the clouds.

  “Will we ever go back?” he asked.

  “Most likely not,” I told him. Maybe war had consumed them all. I remembered the stories soldiers told of a new superweapon both sides had supposedly tested out in the deserts of Nevada and North Africa. A bomb that could unleash hell itself and destroy the world many times over. I hadn’t heard of any new Earthmen being captured, or coming through the skies, so maybe the atom bomb had been used.

  Or maybe Earth assumed that the surface of Venus was too dangerous, as both missions there had failed to return.

  But I told my son of the blue skies and beautiful places I’d seen. About his grandparents and great-grandparents. All the history I knew.

  “One day, you, or your child, will stand tall among the Venusians,” I told him. He looked more like his mother than me. And while it complicated our relationship, I knew at least some small part of what he was going through. “But always remember where you came from.”

  When he hugged me, his face showed that he didn’t understand.

  But I would continue to tell him anyway. Until the stories lodged deep and could be carried onward.

  “I know I’m of the tribe of Earth,” he said, and then left to play in the wading pool near the common house. It was hot, and the splashed water cooled him.

  He never asked about the scars on my arms, but one day I would have to tell him I’d been branded as a runaway. That the overseers marked me, and would beat me for the slightest provocation.

  I never told him his own mother, Maet, cut her throat when they finally caught us. They had followed a homing beacon still working in the wreckage of the airship. They found where we ditched it, and spent months tracking us through the fetid jungle.

  I never told him that the mild-mannered scientist, Eric, threw himself in front of laser fire to save my son’s life.

  I never told him why his “uncle” Shep limped so horribly.

  These things he would discover the truth of sooner or later, and I wanted it to be as late as possible.

  On Earth, many slaves living in the very country I had risked my life to protect had in the past tried to run away, like I had. And been dragged all the way back across states, hundreds of miles, to the place they’d run away from. Some across countries.

  Because a successful runaway was a precedent. They’d spent resources to hunt us down and bring us back. And in some ways, I’d been no different than Heston. I’d assumed I was smart. Different. Special. That I would be the one to beat the odds.

  I knew more now. More of the maps, and paths, and geographies out past Kish. I knew them better than ever before. But to risk the run was to risk my innocent child’s flesh to torture, or worse, for being a runaway if caught.

  When he was older, I thought, maybe he would want to try to escape with us. Or maybe not, and I would have to leave him to face life on his own. But I couldn’t leave him now. This is how so many in the past must have gotten trapped, I realized, even as I continued to plan my escape.

  I found myself apologizing to my own ancestors. Apologizing for getting caught again, after they worked so hard to free themselves.

  There was a poem one of my aunts read to me by a poet named Paul Dunbar. I understood it, finally, though I wish I never had.

  When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

 
When he beats his bars and he would be free;

  It is not a carol of joy or glee,

  But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,

  But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

  I know why the caged bird sings!

  Every night, in the common house, while I fell asleep, I dreamt of pale, blue skies.

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut, and now lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts, after several years living in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tide-line,” which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom.” Her short work has appeared in Asimov’s, Subterranean, SCI FICTION, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Strange Horizons, On Spec, and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse and New Amsterdam. She is the author of three highly acclaimed SF novels, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired, and of the Alternate History Fantasy Promethean Age series, which includes the novels Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel, and Hell and Earth. Her other books include the novels Carnival, Undertow, Chill, Dust, All the Windwracked Stars, By the Mountain Bound, Range of Ghosts, a novel in collaboration with Sarah Monette, The Tempering of Men, and two chapbook novellas, “Bone and Jewel Creatures” and “Ad Eternum.” Her most recent books are a new collection, Shoggoths in Bloom, two novels, Shattered Pillars and One-Eyed Jack, and a novella, “The Book of Iron.”

  Here she paints a dramatic portrait of a scientist so determined to prove a controversial theory that she’ll go to any length to do so—even if it kills her. Which, on Venus, it well might.

  The Heart’s Filthy Lesson

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  THE SUN BURNED THROUGH THE CLOUDS AROUND NOON ON the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and—despite the nagging desire to keep traveling—had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. The prehensile fingers and leaping legs of her bioreactor-printed, skin-bonded adaptshell made it simple enough to swarm up one of the tall, gracile pseudofigs and creep along its smooth grey branches until the ceaseless Venusian rain dripped directly on her adaptshell’s slick-furred head.

  It was safer in the treetops if you were sitting still. Nothing big enough to want to eat her was likely to climb up this far. The grues didn’t come out until nightfall, but there were swamp-tigers, damn-things, and velociraptors to worry about. The forest was too thick for predators any bigger than that, but a swarm of scorpion-rats was no joke. And Venus had only been settled for three hundred days, and most of that devoted to Aphrodite Terra; there were still plenty of undiscovered monsters out here in the wilderness.

  The water did not bother Dharthi, nor did the dip and sway of the branch in the wind. Her adaptshell was beautifully tailored to this terrain, and that fur shed water like the hydrophobic miracle of engineering that it was. The fur was a glossy, iridescent purple that qualified as black in most lights, to match the foliage that dripped rain like strings of glass beads from the multiple points of palmate leaves. Red-black, to make the most of the rainy grey light. They’d fold their leaves up tight and go dormant when night came.

  Dharthi had been born with a chromosomal abnormality that produced red-green color blindness. She’d been about ten solar days old when they’d done the gene therapy to fix it, and she just about remembered her first glimpses of the true, saturated colors of Venus. She’d seen it first as if it were Earth: washed-out and faded.

  For now, however, they were alive with the scurryings and chitterings of a few hundred different species of Cytherean canopy-dwellers. And the quiet, nearly contented sound of Dharthi munching on cake. She would not dwell; she would not stew. She would look at all this natural majesty and try to spot the places where an unnaturally geometric line or angle showed in the topography of the canopy.

  From here, she could stare up the enormous sweep of Maxwell Montes to the north, its heights forested to the top in Venus’s deep, rich atmosphere—but the sight of them lost for most of its reach in clouds. Dharthi could only glimpse the escarpment at all because she was on the “dry” side. Maxwell Montes scraped the heavens, kicking the cloud layer up as if it had struck an aileron, so the “wet” side got the balance of the rain. Balance in this case meaning that the mountains on the windward side were scoured down to granite, and a nonadapted terrestrial organism had better bring breathing gear.

  But here in the lee, the forest flourished, and on a clear hour from a height, visibility might reach a couple of klicks or more.

  Dharthi took another bite of cake—it might have been “chocolate”; it was definitely caffeinated, because she was picking up the hit on her blood monitors already—and turned herself around on her branch to face downslope. The sky was definitely brighter, the rain falling back to a drizzle, then a mist, and the clouds were peeling back along an arrowhead trail that led directly back to the peak above her. A watery golden smudge brightened one patch of clouds. They tore, and she glimpsed the full, unguarded brilliance of the daystar, just hanging there in a chip of glossy cerulean sky, the clouds all around it smeared with thick, unbelievable rainbows. Waves of mist rolled and slid among the leaves of the canopy, made golden by the shimmering, unreal light.

  Dharthi was glad she was wearing the shell. It played the sun’s warmth through to her skin without also relaying the risks of ultraviolet exposure. She ought to be careful of her eyes, however: a crystalline shield protected them, but its filters weren’t designed for naked light.

  The forest noises rose to a cacophony. It was the third time in Dharthi’s one hundred solar days of life that she had glimpsed the sun. Even here, she imagined that some of these animals would never have seen it before.

  She decided to accept it as a good omen for her journey. Sadly, there was no way to spin the next thing that happened that way.

  “Hey,” said a voice in her head. “Good cake.”

  “That proves your pan is malfunctioning, if anything does,” Dharthi replied sourly. Never accept a remote synaptic link with a romantic and professional partner. No matter how convenient it seems at the time, and in the field.

  Because someday they might be a romantic and professional partner you really would rather not talk to right now.

  “I heard that.”

  “What do you want, Kraken?”

  Dharthi imagined Kraken smiling, and wished she hadn’t. She could hear it in her partner’s “voice” when she spoke again, anyway. “Just to wish you a happy dieiversary.”

  “Aw,” Dharthi said. “Aren’t you sweet. Noblesse oblige?”

  “Maybe,” Kraken said tiredly, “I actually care?”

  “Mmm,” Dharthi said. “What’s the ulterior motive this time?”

  Kraken sighed. It was more a neural flutter than a heave of breath, but Dharthi got the point all right. “Maybe I actually care.”

  “Sure,” Dharthi said. “Every so often you have to glance down from Mount Olympus and check up on the lesser beings.”

  “Olympus is on Mars,” Kraken said.

  It didn’t make Dharthi laugh because she clenched her right fist hard enough that, even though the cushioning adaptshell squished against her palm, she still squeezed the blood out of her fingers. You and all your charm. You don’t get to charm me anymore.

  “Look,” Kraken said. “You have something to prove. I understand that.”

  “How can you possibly understand that? When was the last time you were turned down for a resource allocation? Doctor youngest-ever recipient of the Cytherean Award for Excellence in Xenoarcheology?
Doctor Founding Field-Martius Chair of Archaeology at the University on Aphrodite?”

  “The University on Aphrodite,” Kraken said, “is five Quonset huts and a repurposed colonial landing module.”

  “It’s what we’ve got.”

  “I peaked early,” Kraken said, after a pause. “I was never your rival, Dharthi. We were colleagues.” Too late, in Dharthi’s silence, she realized her mistake. “Are colleagues.”

  “You look up from your work often enough to notice I’m missing?”

  There was a pause. “That may be fair,” Kraken said at last. “But if being professionally focused—”

  “Obsessed.”

  “—is a failing, it was hardly a failing limited to me. Come back. Come back to me. We’ll talk about it. I’ll help you try for a resource voucher again tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want your damned help, Kraken!”

  The forest around Dharthi fell silent. Shocked, she realized she’d shouted out loud.

  “Haring off across Ishtar alone, with no support—you’re not going to prove your theory about aboriginal Cytherean settlement patterns, Dhar. You’re going to get eaten by a grue.”

  “I’ll be home by dark,” Dharthi said. “Anyway, if I’m not—all the better for the grue.”

  “You know who else was always on about being laughed out of the Academy?” Kraken said. Her voice had that teasing tone that could break Dharthi’s worst, most self-loathing, prickliest mood—if she let it. “Moriarty.”

  I will not laugh. Fuck you.

  Dharthi couldn’t tell if Kraken had picked it up or not. There was a silence, as if she were controlling her temper or waiting for Dharthi to speak.

  “If you get killed,” Kraken said, “make a note in your file that I can use your DNA. You’re not getting out of giving me children that easily.”

  Ha-ha, Dharthi thought. Only serious. She couldn’t think of what to say, and so she said nothing. The idea of a little Kraken filled her up with mushy softness inside. But somebody’s career would go on hold for the first fifty solar days of that kid’s life, and Dharthi was pretty sure it wouldn’t be Kraken’s.