by Unknown
“You do? How did . . . aren’t they rare and expensive?”
“I made this one myself. Well, Panalina showed me how to use pinyon crystals and electric current to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. We’ll put some passengers to work, taking turns at the spin generator.” And he warned her. “It’s a small unit. It may not produce enough.”
“Well, no sense putting things off, then,” Petri said with a grandmother’s tone of decisiveness. “Give your orders, man.”
The ascent became grueling. Adults and larger teens took turns at the pumps, expelling enough ballast water for the sub to start rising at a good pace . . . then correcting when it seemed too quick. Jonah kept close track of gauges revealing pressure both inside and beyond the shells. He also watched for symptoms of decompression sickness—another factor keeping things slow. All passengers not on shift were encouraged to sleep—difficult enough when the youngest children kept crying over the pain in their ears. Jonah taught them all how to yawn or pinch their noses to equalize pressure, though his explanations kept being punctuated by fits of sneezing.
Above all, even while resting, they had to breathe deep as their lungs gradually purged and expelled excess gas from their bloodstreams.
Meanwhile, the fore-chamber resonated with a constant background whine as older kids took turns at the spark separator, turning its crank so that small amounts of seawater divided into component elements—one of them breathable. The device had to be working—a layer of salt gathered in the brine collector. Still, Jonah worried. Did I attach the poles right? Might I be filling the storage bottle with oxygen and letting hydrogen into the cabin? Polluting the sub with an explosive mix that could put us out of our misery at any second?
He wasn’t sure how to tell—none of his books said—though he recalled vaguely that hydrogen had no odor.
After following him on his rounds, inspecting everything and repeating his explanations several times, Petri felt confident enough to insist, “You must rest now, Jonah. I will continue to monitor our rate of ascent and make minor adjustments. Right now, I want you to close your eyes.”
When he tried to protest, she insisted, with a little more of the accented tone used by Laussane mothers. “We will need you far more in a while. You’ll require all your powers near the end. So lie down and recharge yourself. I promise to call if anything much changes.”
Accepting her reasoning, he obeyed by curling up on a couple of grain sacks that Xerish brought forward to the control cabin. Jonah’s eyelids shut, gratefully. The brain, however, was another matter.
How deep are we now?
It prompted an even bigger question: How deep is the bottom of Cleopatra Canyon nowadays?
According to lore, the first colonists used to care a lot about measuring the thickness of Venusian seas, back when some surface light used to penetrate all the way to the ocean floor. They would launch balloons attached to huge coils of string, in order to both judge depth and sample beyond the therm-o-cline barrier and even from the hot, deadly sky. Those practices died out—though Jonah had seen one of the giant capstan reels once, during a visit to Chown Dome, gathering dust and moldering in a swampy corner.
The way Earth denizens viewed their planet’s hellish interior, that was how Cleo dwellers thought of the realm above. Though there had been exceptions. Rumors held that Melvil, that legendary rascal, upon returning from his discovery of Theodora Canyon, had demanded support to start exploring the great heights. Possibly even the barrier zone, where living things thronged and might be caught for food. Of course, he was quite mad—though boys still whispered about him in hushed tones.
How many comets? Jonah found himself wondering. Only one book in Tairee spoke of the great Venus Terraforming Project that predated the Coss invasion. Mighty robots, as patient as gods, gathered iceballs at the farthest fringe of the solar system and sent them plummeting from that unimaginably distant realm to strike this planet—several each day, always at the same angle and position—both speeding the world’s rotation and drenching its long-parched basins. If each comet was several kilometers in diameter . . . how thick an ocean might spread across an entire globe, in twenty generations of grandmothers?
For every one that struck, five others were aimed to skim close by, tearing through the dense, clotted atmosphere of Venus, dragging some of it away before plunging to the sun. The scale of such an enterprise was stunning, beyond belief. So much so that Jonah truly doubted he could be of the same species that did such things. Petri, maybe. She could be that smart. Not me.
How were such a people ever conquered?
The roil of his drifting mind moved onward to might-have-beens. If not for that misguided comet—striking six hours late to wreak havoc near the canyon colonies—Jonah and his bride would by now have settled into a small Laussane cottage, getting to know each other in more traditional ways. Despite, or perhaps because of the emergency, he actually felt far more the husband of a vividly real person than he would in that other reality, where physical intimacy happened. . . . Still, the lumpy grain sacks made part of him yearn for her in ways that—now—might never come to pass. That world would have been better . . . one where the pinyons waved their bright leaves gently overhead. Where he might show her tricks of climbing vines, then swing from branch to branch, carrying her in his arms while the wind of flying passage ruffled their hair—
A twang sound vibrated the cabin, like some mighty cord coming apart. The sub throbbed and Jonah felt it roll a bit.
His eyes opened and he realized, I was asleep. Moreover, his head now rested on Petri’s lap. Her hand had been the breeze in his hair.
Jonah sat up.
“What was that?”
“I do not know. There was a sharp sound. The ship hummed a bit, and now the floor no longer tilts.”
“No longer—”
Jumping up with a shout, he hurried over to the gauges, then cursed low and harsh.
“What is it, Jonah?”
“Quick—wake all the adults and get them to work pumping!”
She wasted no time demanding answers. But as soon as crews were hard at work, Petri approached Jonah again at the control station, one eyebrow raised.
“The remaining stone ballast,” he explained. “It must have been hanging by a thread, or a single lashing. Now it’s completely gone. The sub’s tilt is corrected, but we’re ascending too fast.”
Petri glanced at two Sadoulites and two Laussanites who were laboring to refill the ballast tanks. “Is there anything else we can do to slow down?”
Jonah shrugged. “I suppose we might unpack the leaky bearing and let more water into the aft compartment. But we’d have no control. The stream could explode in our faces. We might flood or lose the chamber. All told, I’d rather risk decompression sickness.”
She nodded, agreeing silently.
They took their own turn at the pumps, then supervised another crew until, at last, the tanks were full. Bird could get no heavier. Not without flooding the compartments themselves.
“We have to lose internal pressure. That means venting air overboard,” he said, “in order to equalize.”
“But we’ll need it to breathe!”
“There’s no choice. With our tanks full of water, there’s no place to put extra air and still reduce pressure.”
So, different pumps and valves, but more strenuous work. Meanwhile, Jonah kept peering at folks in the dim illumination of just two faint glow bulbs, watching for signs of the bends. Dizziness, muscle aches, and labored breathing? These could just be the result of hard labor. The book said to watch out also for joint pain, rashes, delirium, or sudden unconsciousness. He did know that the old dive tables were useless—based on Earth-type humanity. And we’ve changed. First because our scientist ancestors modified themselves and their offspring. But time, too, has altered what we are, even long after we lost those wizard powers. Each generation was an experiment.
Has it made us less vulnerable to such things? Or
more so?
Someone tugged his arm. It wasn’t Petri, striving at her pump. Jonah looked down at one of the children, still wearing a stained and crumpled bridesmaid’s dress, who pulled shyly, urging Jonah to come follow. At first, he thought: It must be the sickness. She’s summoning me to help someone’s agony. But what can I do?
Only it wasn’t toward the stern that she led him, but the forward-most part of the ship . . . to the view patch, where she pointed.
“What is it?” Pressing close to the curved pane, Jonah tensed as he starkly envisioned some new cloud of debris . . . till he looked up and saw—
—light. Vague at first. Only a child’s perfect vision would have noticed it so early. But soon it spread and brightened across the entire vault overhead.
I thought we would pass through the therm-o-cline. He had expected a rough—perhaps even lethal—transition past that supposed barrier between upper and lower oceans. But it must have happened gently, while he slept.
Jonah called someone to relieve Petri and brought her forth to see.
“Go back and tell people to hold on tight,” Petri dispatched the little girl, then she turned to grab Jonah’s waist as he took the control straps. At this rate they appeared to be seconds away from entering Venusian hell.
Surely it has changed, he thought, nursing a hope that had never been voiced, even in his mind. The ocean has burgeoned as life fills the seas. . . .
Already he spied signs of movement above. Flitting, flickering shapes— living versions of the crushed and dead tumbledowns that sometimes fell to Tairee’s bottom realm, now undulating and darting about what looked like scattered patches of dense, dangling weed. He steered to avoid those.
If the sea has changed, then might not the sky, the air, even the highlands?
Charts of Venus, radar mapped by ancient Earthling space probes, revealed vast continents and basins, a topography labeled with names like Aphrodite Terra and Lakshmi Planum. Every single appellation was that of a female from history or literature or legend. Well, that seemed fair enough. But had it been a cruel joke to call the baked and bone-dry lowlands “seas”?
Till humanity decided to make old dreams come true.
What will we find?
To his and Petri’s awestruck eyes, the dense crowd of life revealed glimpses— shapes like dragons, like fish, or those ancient blimps that once cruised the skies of ancient Earth. And something within Jonah allowed itself to hope.
Assuming we survive decompression, might the fiery, sulfurous air now be breathable? Perhaps barely, as promised by the sagas? By now, could life have taken to high ground? Seeded in some clever centuries delay by those same pre-Coss designers?
His mind pictured scenes from a few dog-eared storybooks, only enormously expanded and brightened. Vast, measureless jungles, drenched by rainstorms, echoing with the bellows of gigantic beasts. A realm so huge, so rich and densely forested that a branch of humanity might thrive, grow, prosper, and learn—regaining might and confidence—beneath that sheltering canopy, safe from invader eyes.
That, once upon a time, had been the dream, though few imagined it might fully come to pass.
Jonah tugged the tiller to avoid a looming patch of dangling vegetation. Then, ahead and above, the skyward shallows suddenly brightened, so fiercely that he and Petri had to shade their eyes, inhaling and exhaling heavy gasps. They both cried out as a great, slithering shape swerved barely out of the sub’s way. Then brilliance filled the cabin like a blast of molten fire.
I was wrong to hope! It truly is hell!
A roar of foamy separation . . . and for long instants Jonah felt free of all weight. He let go of the straps and clutched Petri tight, twisting to put his body between hers and the wall as their vessel flew over the sea, turned slightly, then dropped back down, striking the surface with a shuddering blow and towering splash.
Lying crumpled below the viewing patch, they panted, as did everyone else aboard, groaning and groping themselves to check for injuries. For reassurance of life. And gradually the hellish brightness seemed to abate till Jonah realized, It is my eyes, adapting. They never saw daylight before.
Jonah and Petri helped each other stand. Together, they turned, still shading their eyes. Sound had transformed, and so had the very texture of the air, now filled with strange aromas.
There must be a breach!
With shock, still blinking away glare-wrought tears, Jonah saw the cause. Impact must have knocked loose the dog bolts charged with holding shut the main hatch, amidships on the starboard side—never meant to open anywhere but at the safety of a colonial dock.
With a shout he hurried over, even knowing it was too late. The poisons of Venus—
—apparently weren’t here.
No one keeled over. His body’s sole reaction to the inrushing atmosphere was to sneeze, a report so loud and deep that it rocked him back.
Jonah reached the hatch and tried pushing it closed, but Bird of Tairee was slightly tilted to port. The heavy door overwhelmed Jonah’s resistance and kept gradually opening, from crack to slit, to gap, to chasm.
“I’ll help you, Jonah,” came an offer so low, like a rich male baritone, yet recognizably that of his wife. He turned, saw her eyes wide with surprise at her own voice.
“The air . . . it contains. . . .” His words emerged now a deep bass. “. . . different gases than . . . we got from pinyons.”
Different . . . but breathable. Even pleasant. Blinking a couple of times, he managed to shrug off the shock of his new voice and tried once more to close the hatch before giving up for now. With the boat’s slight leftward roll, there was no immediate danger of flooding, as seawater lapped a meter or so below. The opening must be closed soon, of course. . . .
. . . but not quite yet. For, as Jonah and Petri stood at the sill, what confronted them was more than vast, rippling-blue ocean and a cloud-dense firmament. Something else lay between those two, just ahead and to starboard, a thick mass of shimmery greens and browns that filled the horizon, receding in mist toward distant, serrated skylines. Though he never dreamed of witnessing such a thing firsthand, they both recognized the sight, from ancient, faded pictures.
Land. Shore. Dense forests. Everything.
And overhead, creatures flapped strange, graceful wings, or drifted like floating jellyfish above leafy spires.
“It will take some time to figure out what we can eat,” his wife commented, with feminine practicality.
“Hm,” Jonah replied, too caught up in wonder to say more, a silence that lasted for many poundings of his heart. Until, finally, he managed to add—
“Someday. We must go back down. And tell.”
After another long pause, Petri answered.
“Yes, someday.”
She held him tight around the chest, a forceful constriction that only filled Jonah with strength. His lungs expanded as he inhaled deeply a sweet smell, and knew that only part of that was her.
Nick Wolven’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy andScience Fiction, and Analog, among other publications. He lives in New York City with his family.
NO PLACEHOLDER FOR YOU, MY LOVE
Nick Wolven
1.
Claire met him at a dinner party in New Orleans, and afterward, she had to remind herself this was true. Yes, that had been it, his very first appearance. It seemed incredible there had been anything so finite as a first time.
He was seated across from her, two chairs down, a gorgeous woman on either side. As usual, the subject had turned to food.
“But I’ve been to this house a dozen times,” one of the gorgeous women was saying. “I’ve been to dinner parties, dance parties, even family parties. And every time, they serve the wrong kind of cuisine.”
She had red hair, the color of the candlelight reflected off the varnished chairs. The house was an old house, full of old things, handmade textiles and walnut chiffoniers, oil paintings of nameless Civil War colonels.
&n
bsp; “Is that a problem?” said the young man on Claire’s left. “Why should you care?”
“Because,” said the redhead, pursing her lips. “Meringue pie, at an elegant soiree? Wine and steak tartare, at a child’s birthday party? Lobster bisque at a dance? For God’s sake, it was all over the floor. It seems, I don’t know. Lazy. Thoughtless. Cobbled together.”
She lifted her glass of wine to her mouth, and the liquid vanished the instant it touched her tongue.
The man who was to mean so much to Claire, to embody in his person so much hope and loss, leaned over his soup, eyes dark with amusement. “It is cobbled together. Of course it is. But isn’t that the best part?”
“And why is that, Byron?” someone said with a sigh.
Byron. A fake name, Claire assumed, distilled from the fog of some half-remembered youthful interest. But then, you never knew.
Whatever the source of his name, Byron’s face had the handsome roughness earned through active living. Dots of stubble grayed his skin. A tiny scar divided one eyebrow. His smile made a charming pattern of wrinkles around his eyes. It was a candid face, a well-architected face, a forty-something face.
“Because,” said Byron, and caught Claire’s eye, as if only she would understand. “Look at this furniture, the chandelier. Look at that music stand in the corner. American plantation style, rococo, Art Nouveau. Every piece a different movement. Some are complete anachronisms. That’s why I love this house. You can see the spirit of the designers, here. A kind of whimsy. It’s so personal, so scattershot.”
“You’re such a talker, Byron,” someone sighed.
“Look at all of you,” Byron said, moving his spoon in a circle to encompass the ring of faces. “Some of you I’ve never seen before in my life. And here we are, brought together by chance, for one evening only. You know what? That delights me. That thrills me.” His gesture halted at Claire’s face. “That enchants me.”
“And after tonight,” said the redhead, “we’ll go our separate ways, and forget each other, and maybe never see each other again. So is that part of the wonder, for you, Byron, or does that spoil the wonder?”
