The Vanishing Venusians Reseen

by Lee Brackett

bothering to come back, maybe?'

  'I didn't say that. Like we both won't come back. But two is better than one.'

  Harker smiled. The smile was enigmatic and not very nephew. Gibbons said, 'She's right, Matty.' Harker shrugged. Then Sim stood up.

  'Two is good,' she said, 'but three is better.' She turned to Gibbons. 'There's nearly five hundred of us, sir. If there's new land up there, we ought to share the burden of finding it.'

  Gibbons nodded. Harker said, 'You're crazy, Sim. Why you want to do all that climbing, maybe to no place?'

  Sim smiled. Her teeth were unbelievably white in the sweat-polished blackness of her face. 'But that's what my people always done, Matty. A lot of climbing, to no place.'

  They made their preparations and had a last night's sleep. McLaren said goodbye to Viki. He didn't cry. He knew why she was going. He kissed her, and all he said was, 'Be careful.' All she said was, 'I'll be back before she's born.'

  They started at dawn, carrying dried fish and sea-berries made into pemmican, and their long knives and ropes for climbing. They had long ago run out of ammunition for their few blasters, and they had no equipment for making more. All were adept at throwing spears, and carried three short ones barbed with bone across their backs.

  It was raining when they crossed the mud flat, wading thigh-deep in heavy mist. Harker led the way through the belt of swamp. She was an old hand at it, with an uncanny quickness in spotting vegetation that was as independently alive and hungry as she was. Venus is one vast hothouse, and the plants have developed into species as varied and marvelous as the reptiles or the mammals, crawling out of the pre-Cambrian seas as primitive flagellates and growing wills of their own, with appetites and motive power to match. The children of the colony learned at an early age not to pick flowers. The blossoms too often bit back.

  The swamp was narrow, and they came out of it safely. A great swamp-dragon, a leshen, screamed not far off, but they hunt by night, and it was too sleepy to chase them. Harker stood finally on firm ground and studied the cliff.

  The rock was roughened by weather, hacked at by ages of erosion, savaged by earthquake. There were stretches of loose shale and great slabs that looked as though they would peel off at a touch, but Harker nodded.

  'We can climb it,' she said. 'Question is, how high is up?'

  Sim laughed. 'High enough for the Golden City, maybe. Have we all got a clear conscience? Can't carry no load of sin that far!'

  Rory McLaren looked at Harker.

  Harker said, 'All right, I confess. I don't care if there's land up there or not. All I wanted was to get the hell out of that damn boat before I went clean nuts. So now you know.'

  McLaren nodded. She didn't seem surprised. 'Let's climb.'

  By morning of the second day they were in the clouds. They crawled upward through opal-tinted steam, half liquid, hot and unbearable. They crawled for two more days. The first night or two Sim sang during her watch, while they rested on some ledge. After that she was too tired. McLaren began to give out, though she wouldn't say so. Matty Harker grew more taciturn and ill-tempered, if possible, but otherwise there was no change. The clouds continued to hide the top of the cliff.

  During one rest break McLaren said hoarsely, 'Don't these cliffs ever end?' Her skin was yellowish, her eyes glazed with fever.

  'Maybe,' said Harker, 'they go right up beyond the sky.' The fever was on her again, too. It lived in the marrow of the exiles, coming out at intervals to shake and sear them, and then retreating. Sometimes it did not retreat, and after nine days there was no need.

  McLaren said, 'You wouldn't care if they did, would you?'

  'I didn't ask you to come.'

  'But you wouldn't care.'

  'Ah, shut up.'

  McLaren went for Harker's throat.

  Harker hit her, with great care and accuracy. McLaren sagged down and took her head in her hands and wept. Sim stayed out of it.

  She shook her head, and after a while she began to sing to herself, or someone beyond herself. 'Oh, nobody knows the trouble I see . . . .'

  Harker pulled herself up. Her ears rang and she shivered uncontrollably, but she could still take some of McLaren's weight on herself. They were climbing a steep ledge, fairly wide and not difficult.

  'Let's get on,' said Harker.

  About two hundred feet beyond that point the ledge dipped and began to go down again in a series of broken steps. Overhead the cliff face bulged outward. Only a fly could have climbed it. They stopped. Harker cursed with vicious slowness. Sim closed her eyes and smiled. She was a little crazy with fever herself.

  'Golden City's at the top. That's where I'm going.'

  She started off along the ledge, following its decline toward a jutting shoulder, around which it vanished. Harker laughed sardonically. McLaren pulled free of her and went doggedly after Sim. Harker shrugged and followed.

  Around the shoulder the ledge washed out completely.

  They stood still. The steaming clouds shut them in before, and behind was a granite wall hung within thick fleshy creepers. Dead end.

  'Well?' said Harker.

  McLaren sat down. She didn't cry, or say anything. She just sat. Sim stood with her arms hanging and her chin on her huge black breast. Harker said, 'See what I meant, about the Promised Land? Venus is a fixed wheel, and you can't win.'

  It was then that she noticed the cool air. She had thought it was just a fever chill, but it lifted her hair, and it had a definite pattern on her body. It even had a cool, clean smell to it. It was blowing out through the creepers.

  Harker began ripping with her knife. She broke through into a cave mouth, a jagged rip worn smooth at the bottom by what must once have been a river.

  'That draft is coming from the top of the plateau,' Harker said. 'Wind must be blowing up there and pushing it down. There may be a way through.'

  McLaren and Sim both showed a slow, terrible growth of hope. The three of them went without speaking into the tunnel.

  II

  They made good time. The clean air acted as a tonic, and hope spurred them on. The tunnel sloped upward rather sharply, and presently Harker heard water, a low thunderous murmur as of an underground river up ahead. It was utterly dark, but the smooth channel of stone was easy to follow.

  Sim said, 'Isn't that light up ahead?'

  'Yeah,' said Harker. 'Some kind of phosphorescence. I don't like that river. It may stop us.'

  They went on in silence. The glow grew stronger, the air more damp. Patches of phosphorescent lichen appeared on the walls, glimmering with dim jewel tones like an unhealthy rainbow. The roar of the water was very loud.

  They came upon it suddenly. It flowed across the course of their tunnel in a broad channel worn deep into the rock, so that its level had fallen below its old place and left the tunnel dry. It was a wide river, slow and majestic. Lichen spangled the roof and walls, reflecting in dull glints of color from the water.

  Overhead there was a black chimney going up through the rock, and the cool draft came from there with almost hurricane force, much of which was dissipated in the main river tunnel. Harker judged there was a cliff formation on the surface that siphoned the wind downward. The chimney was completely inaccessible.

  Harker said, 'I guess we'll have to go upstream, along the side.' The rock was eroded enough to make that possible, showing wide ledges at different levels.

  McLaren said, 'What if this river doesn't come from the surface? What if it starts from an underground source?'

  'You stuck your neck out,' Harker said. 'Come on.'

  They started. After a while, tumbling like porpoises in the black water, the golden creatures swam by, and saw the women, and stopped, and swam back again.

  They were not very large, the largest about the size of a twelve-year-old child. Their bodies were anthropoid, but adapted to swimming with shimmering webs. They glowed with a golden light, phosphorescent like the lichen, and their eyes were lidless and black, like
one huge spreading pupil. Their faces were incredible. Harker could remember, faintly, the golden dandelions that grew on the lawn in summer. The heads and faces of the swimmers were like that, covered with streaming petals that seemed to have independent movements, as though they were sensory organs as well as decoration.

  Harker said, 'For cripesake, what are they?'

  'They look like flowers,' McLaren said.

  'They look more like fish,' the black woman said.

  Harker laughed. 'I'll bet they're both. I'll bet they're plannies that grew where they had to be amphibious.' The colonists had shortened plant-animal to planimal, and then just planny. 'I've seen gimmicks in the swamps that weren't so far away from these. But jeez, get the eyes on 'em! They look human.'

  'The shape's human, too, almost.' McLaren shivered. 'I wish they wouldn't look at us that way.'

  Sim said, 'As long as they just look. I'm not gonna worry . . . .'

  They didn't. They started to close in below the women, swimming effortlessly against the current. Some of them began to clamber out on the low ledge behind them. They were agile and graceful. There was something unpleasantly child-like about them. There were fifteen or twenty of them, and they reminded Harker of a gang of mischievous lads—only the mischief had a queer soulless quality of malevolence.

  Harker led the way faster along the ledge. Her knife was drawn and she carried a short spear in her right hand.

  The tone of the river changed. The channel broadened, and up ahead Harker saw that the cavern ended in a vast shadowy place, the water spreading