Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  She couldn’t think of what to say in response, and the silence got heavy until Kraken said, “Dammit. I’m worried about you.”

  “Worry about yourself.” Dharthi couldn’t break the connection, but she could bloody well shut down her end of the dialogue. And she could refuse to hear.

  She pitched the remains of the cake as far across the canopy as she could, then regretted it. Hopefully, nothing Cytherean would try to eat it; it might give the local biology a bellyache.

  It was ironically inevitable that Dharthi, named by her parents in a fit of homesickness for Terra, would grow up to be the most Cytherean of Cythereans. She took great pride in her adaptation, in her ability to rough it. Some of the indigenous plants and many of the indigenous animals could be eaten, and Dharthi knew which ones. She also knew, more important, which ones were likely to eat her.

  She hadn’t mastered humans nearly as well. Dharthi wasn’t good at politics. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t good at making friends. Unlike Kraken. Dharthi wasn’t charming or beautiful or popular or brilliant. Unlike Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.

  Kraken was a better scientist, or at least a better-understood one. Kraken was a better person, probably. More generous, less prickly, certainly. But there was one thing Dharthi was good at. Better at than Kraken. Better at than anyone. Dharthi was good at living on Venus, at being Cytherean. She was more comfortable in and proficient with an adaptshell than anyone she had ever met.

  In fact, it was peeling the shell off that came hard. So much easier to glide through the jungle or the swamp like something that belonged there, wearing a quasibiologic suit of superpowered armor bonded to your neural network and your skin. The human inside was a soft, fragile, fleshy thing, subject to complicated feelings and social dynamics, and Dharthi despised her. But that same human, while bonded to the shell, ghosted through the rain forest like a native and saw things no one else ever had.

  A kilometer from where she had stopped for cake, she picked up the trail of a velociraptor. It was going in the right direction, so she tracked it. It wasn’t a real velociraptor; it wasn’t even a dinosaur. Those were Terran creatures, albeit extinct; this was a Cytherean meat-eating monster that bore a superficial resemblance. Like the majority of Cytherean vertebrates, it had six limbs though it ran balanced on the rear ones and the two forward pairs had evolved into little more than graspers. Four eyes were spaced equidistantly around the dome of its skull, giving it a dome of monocular vision punctuated by narrow slices of depth perception. The business end of the thing was delineated by a saw-toothed maw that split wide enough to bite a human being in half. The whole of it was camouflaged with long, draggled fur-feathers that grew thick with near-black algae, or the Cytherean cognate.

  Dharthi followed the velociraptor for over two kilometers, and the beast never even noticed she was there. She smiled inside her adaptshell. Kraken was right: going out into the jungle alone and unsupported would be suicide for most people. But wasn’t it like her not to give Dharthi credit for this one single thing that Dharthi could do better than anyone?

  She knew that the main Cytherean settlements had been on Ishtar Terra. Knew it in her bones. And she was going to prove it, whether anybody was willing to give her an allocation for the study or not.

  They’ll be sorry, she thought, and had to smile at her own adolescent petulance. They’ll rush to support me once this is done.

  The not-a-dinosaur finally veered off to the left. Dharthi kept jogging/​swinging/​swimming/​splashing/​climbing forward, letting the shell do most of the work. The highlands leveled out into the great plateau the new settlers called the Lakshmi Planum. No one knew what the aboriginals had called it. They’d been gone for—to an approximation—ten thousand years: as long as it had taken humankind to get from the Neolithic (agriculture, stone tools) to jogging through the jungles of an alien world wearing a suit of power armor engineered from printed muscle fiber and cheetah DNA.

  Lakshmi Planum, ringed with mountains on four sides, was one of the few places on the surface of Venus where you could not see an ocean. The major Cytherean landmasses, Aphrodite and Ishtar, were smaller than South America. The surface of this world was 85 percent water—water less salty than Earth’s oceans because there was less surface to leach minerals into it through runoff. And the Lakshmi Planum was tectonically active, with great volcanoes and living faults.

  That activity was one of the reasons Dharthi’s research had brought her here.

  The jungle of the central Ishtarean plateau was not as creeper-clogged and vine-throttled as Dharthi might have expected. It was a mature climax forest, and the majority of the biomass hung suspended over Dharthi’s head, great limbs stretching up umbrella-like to the limited light. Up there, the branches and trunks were festooned with symbiotes, parasites, and commensal organisms. Down here among the trunks, it was dark and still except for the squish of loam underfoot and the ceaseless patter of what rain came through the leaves.

  Dharthi stayed alert but didn’t spot any more large predators on that leg of the journey. There were flickers and scuttlers and fliers galore, species she was sure nobody had named or described. Perhaps on the way back she’d have time to do more, but for now she contented herself with extensive video archives. It wouldn’t hurt to cultivate some good karma with Bio while she was out here. She might need a job sweeping up offices when she got back.

  Stop. Failure is not an option. Not even a possibility.

  Like all such glib sentiments, it didn’t make much of a dent in the bleakness of her mood. Even walking, observing, surveying, she had entirely too much time to think.

  She waded through two more swamps and scaled a basalt ridge—one of the stretching roots of the vast volcano named Sacajawea. Nearly everything on Venus was named after female persons—historical, literary, or mythological—from Terra, from the quaint old system of binary and exclusive genders. For a moment, Dharthi considered such medieval horrors as dentistry without anesthetic, binary gender, and being stuck forever in the body you were born in, locked in and struggling against what your genes dictated. The trap of biology appalled her; she found it impossible to comprehend how people in the olden days had gotten anything done, with their painfully short lives and their limited access to resources, education, and technology.

  The adaptshell stumbled over a tree root, forcing her attention back to the landscape. Of course, modern technology wasn’t exactly perfect either. The suit needed carbohydrate to keep moving and protein to repair muscle tissue. Fortunately, it wasn’t picky about its food source—and Dharthi herself needed rest. The day was long and only half-over. She wouldn’t prove herself if she got so tired she got herself eaten by a megaspider.

  We haven’t conquered all those human frailties yet.

  Sleepily, she climbed a big tree, one that broke the canopy, and slung a hammock high in branches that dripped with fleshy, gorgeous, thickly scented parasitic blossoms, opportunistically decking every limb up here where the light was stronger. They shone bright whites and yellows, mostly, set off against the dark, glossy foliage. Dharthi set proximity sensors, established a tech perimeter above and below, and unsealed the shell before sending it down to forage for the sorts of simple biomass that sustained it. It would be happy with the mulch of the forest floor, and she could call it back when she needed it. Dharthi rolled herself into the hammock as if it were a scent-proof, claw-proof cocoon and tried to sleep.

  Rest eluded. The leaves and the cocoon filtered the sunlight, so it was pleasantly dim, and the cocoon kept the water off except what she’d brought inside with herself when she wrapped up. She was warm and well supported. But that all did very little to alleviate her anxiety.

  She didn’t know exactly where she was going. She was flying blind—hah, she wished she were flying. If she’d had the allocations for an aerial survey, this would all be a lot easier, assuming they could pick anything out through the jungle—and operating on a hunch. An educated hunch.

  But
one that Kraken and her other colleagues—and more important, the Board of Allocation—thought was at best a wild guess and at worst crackpottery.

  What if you’re wrong?

  If she was wrong … well. She didn’t have much to go home to. So she’d better be right that the settlements they’d found on Aphrodite were merely outposts, and that the aboriginal Cythereans had stuck much closer to the north pole. She had realized that the remains—such as they were—of Cytherean settlements clustered in geologically active areas. She theorized that they used geothermal energy, or perhaps had some other unknown purpose for staying there. In any case, Ishtar was far younger, far more geologically active than Aphrodite, as attested by its upthrust granite ranges and its scattering of massive volcanoes. Aphrodite—larger, calmer, safer—had drawn the Terran settlers. Dharthi theorized that Ishtar had been the foundation of Cytherean culture for exactly the opposite reasons.

  She hoped that if she found a big settlement—the remains of one of their cities—she could prove this. And possibly even produce some clue as to what had happened to them all.

  It wouldn’t be easy. A city buried under ten thousand years of sediment and jungle could go unnoticed even by an archaeologist’s trained eye and the most perspicacious modern mapping and visualization technology. And of course she had to be in the right place, and all she had to go on there were guesses—deductions, if she was feeling kind to herself, which she rarely was—about the patterns of relationships between those geologically active areas on Aphrodite and the aboriginal settlements nearby.

  This is stupid. You’ll never find anything without support and an allocation. Kraken never would have pushed her luck this way.

  Kraken never would have needed to. Dharthi knew better than anyone how much effort and dedication and scholarship went into Kraken’s work—but still, it sometimes seemed as if fantastic opportunities just fell into her lover’s lap without effort. And Kraken’s intellect and charisma were so dazzling … it was hard to see past that to the amount of study it took to support that seemingly effortless, comprehensive knowledge of just about everything.

  Nothing made Dharthi feel the limitations of her own ability like spending time with her lover. Hell, Kraken probably would have known which of the animals she was spotting as she ran were new species, and the names and describers of all the known ones.

  If she could have this, Dharthi thought, just this—if she could do one thing to equal all of Kraken’s effortless successes—then she could tolerate how perfect Kraken was the rest of the time.

  This line of thought wasn’t helping the anxiety. She thrashed in the cocoon for another half hour before she finally gave in and took a sedative. Not safe, out in the jungle. But if she didn’t rest, she couldn’t run—and even the Cytherean daylight wasn’t actually endless.

  Dharthi awakened to an animal sniffing her cocoon with great whuffing predatory breaths. An atavistic response, something from the brainstem, froze her in place even as it awakened her. Her arms and legs—naked, so fragile without her skin—felt heavy, numb, limp as if they had fallen asleep. The shadow of the thing’s head darkened the translucent steelsilk as it passed between Dharthi and the sky. The drumming of the rain stopped momentarily. Hard to tell how big it was from that—but big, she thought. An estimation confirmed when it nosed or pawed the side of the cocoon and she felt a broad blunt object as big as her two hands together prod her in the ribs.

  She held her breath, and it withdrew. There was the rain, tapping on her cocoon where it dripped between the leaves. She was almost ready to breathe out again when it made a sound—a thick, chugging noise followed by a sort of roar that had more in common with trains and waterfalls than what most people would identify as an animal sound.

  Dharthi swallowed her scream. She didn’t need Kraken to tell her what that was. Every schoolchild could manage a piping reproduction of the call of one of Venus’s nastiest pieces of charismatic megafauna, the Cytherean swamp-tiger.

  Swamp-tigers were two lies, six taloned legs, and an indiscriminate number of enormous daggerlike teeth in a four-hundred-kilogram body. Two lies, because they didn’t live in swamps—though they passed through them on occasion, because what on Venus didn’t?—and they weren’t tigers. But they were striped violet and jade green to disappear into the thick jungle foliage; they had long, slinky bodies that twisted around sharp turns and barreled up tree trunks without any need to decelerate; and their whisker-ringed mouths hinged open wide enough to bite a grown person in half.

  All four of the swamp-tiger’s bright blue eyes were directed forward. Because it didn’t hurt their hunting, and what creature in its right mind would want to sneak up on a thing like that?

  They weren’t supposed to hunt this high up. The branches were supposed to be too slender to support them.

  Dharthi wasn’t looking forward to getting a better look at this one. It nudged the cocoon again. Despite herself, Dharthi went rigid. She pressed both fists against her chest and concentrated on not whimpering, on not making a single sound. She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly. To consider. Panic gets you eaten.

  She wouldn’t give Kraken the damned satisfaction.

  She had some resources. The cocoon would attenuate her scent, and might disguise it almost entirely. The adaptshell was somewhere in the vicinity, munching away, and if she could make it into that, she stood a chance of outrunning the thing. She weighed a quarter what the swamp-tiger did; she could get up higher into the treetops than it could, theoretically. After all, it wasn’t supposed to come up this high.

  And she was, at least presumptively, somewhat smarter.

  But it could outjump her, outrun her, outsneak her, and—perhaps most important—outchomp her.

  She wasted a few moments worrying about how it had gotten past her perimeter before the sharp pressure of its claws skidding down the rip-proof surface of the cocoon refocused her attention. That was a temporary protection; it might not be able to pierce the cocoon, but it could certainly squash Dharthi to death inside of it, or rip it out of the tree and toss it to the jungle floor. If the fall didn’t kill her, she’d have the cheerful and humiliating choice of yelling for rescue or wandering around injured until something bigger ate her. She needed a way out; she needed to channel five million years of successful primate adaptation, the legacy of clever-monkey ancestors, and figure out how to get away from the not-exactly-cat.

  What would a monkey do? The question was the answer, she realized.

  She just needed the courage to apply it. And the luck to survive whatever then transpired.

  The cocoon was waterproof as well as claw-proof—hydrophobic on the outside, a wicking polymer on the inside. The whole system was impregnated with engineered bacteria that broke down the waste products in human sweat—or other fluids—and returned them to the environment as safe, nearly odorless, nonpolluting water, salts, and a few trace chemicals. Dharthi was going to have to unfasten the damn thing.

  She waited while the swamp-tiger prodded her again. It seemed to have a pattern of investigating and withdrawing—Dharthi heard the rustle and felt the thump and sway as it leaped from branch to branch, circling, making a few horrifically unsettling noises and a bloodcurdling snarl or two, and coming back for another go at the cocoon. The discipline required to hold herself still—not even merely still, but limp—as the creature whuffed and poked left her nauseated with adrenaline. She felt it moving away then. The swing of branches under its weight did nothing to ease the roiling in her gut.

  Now or never.

  Shell! Come and get me! Then she palmed the cocoon’s seal and whipped it open, left hand and foot shoved through internal grips so she didn’t accidentally evert herself into free fall. As she swung, she shook a heavy patter of water drops loose from the folds of the cocoon’s hydrophobic surface. They pattered down. There were a lot of branches between her and the ground; she didn’t fancy making the intimate acquaintanceship of each and every one of them.

/>   The swamp-tiger hadn’t gone as far as she expected. In fact, it was on the branch just under hers. As it whipped its head around and roared, she had an eloquent view from above—a clear shot down its black-violet gullet. The mouth hinged wide enough to bite her in half across the middle; the tongue was thick and fleshy; the palate ribbed and mottled in paler shades of red. If I live through this, I will be able to draw every one of those seventy-two perfectly white teeth from memory.

  She grabbed the safety handle with her right hand as well, heaved with her hips, and flipped the cocoon over so her legs swung free. For a moment, she dangled just above the swamp-tiger. It reared back on its heavy haunches like a startled cat, long tail lashing around to protect its abdomen. Dharthi knew that as soon as it collected its wits it was going to take a swipe at her, possibly with both sets of forelegs.

  It was small for a swamp-tiger—perhaps only two hundred kilos—and its stripes were quite a bit brighter than she would have expected. Even wet, its feathery plumage had the unfinished raggedness she associated with young animals still in their baby coats. It might even have been fuzzy, if it were ever properly dry. Which might explain why it was so high up in the treetops. Previously undocumented behavior in a juvenile animal.

  Wouldn’t it be an irony if this were the next in a long line of xenobiological discoveries temporarily undiscovered again because a scientist happened to get herself eaten? At least she had a transponder. And maybe the shell was near enough to record some of this.

  Data might survive.

  Great, she thought. I wonder where its mama is.

  Then she urinated in its face.

  It wasn’t an aimed stream by any means, though she was wearing the external plumbing currently—easier in the field, until you got a bladder stone. But she had a bladder full of pee saved up during sleep, so there was plenty of it. It splashed down her legs and over the swamp-tiger’s face, and Dharthi didn’t care what your biology was, if you were carbon-oxygen-based, a snoutful of ammonia and urea had to be pretty nasty.