The Clouds of Venus: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q. Morris

  Erik touched down on Venus with his legs wide apart. Nuria fell a few meters away, her AV swaying a bit. Her jetpack was still not functioning optimally. They would need to take care of that later.

  “I landed first,” Nuria cried.

  But you landed after me. Erik laughed. It didn’t matter to him. After all, neither of them could claim to have set foot on the planet, as their bodies were up in the spaceship. The Russians must have earned this honor anyway, unless there had only been robots aboard the landing capsule. But the Russians didn’t seem to care about claiming this honor. Why not—what’s the real reason? he wondered.

  Erik shrugged. They were here because of the strange structures. He displayed the map in his field of vision. “Nuria, we have to go in that direction, toward the volcano. Maybe eighty meters.”

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  Erik looked at the ground. Nothing but dust everywhere, he thought. It was hard and covered by a thin layer of dust. Under these extreme conditions, the dust evidently baked very quickly to form regolith. But due to erosion, the extreme climate constantly added a fresh layer of dust on top of the hardened dust. It was an eternal dust cycle—dust was probably the water of Venus.

  Erik corrected the colors to Earth’s standard. Under the blue sky of home, the ground would look gray. Here, it appeared brown. The clouds created a gloomy atmosphere, laying like a solid blanket over the sky as if someone had wrapped Venus in gray sheets. The sun was a seemingly immobile, bright spot to which no color could be assigned. It was a good thing that they had a ship in orbit and a spaceship in the clouds. Navigation would otherwise be challenging down here, because Venus didn’t even have a significant magnetic field that they could use to orient themselves. On Mars, you could at least use the sky for orientation.

  “Looks pretty disappointing,” Nuria said.

  Erik checked their position. One of the structures should be underneath them, but there was nothing to see from above. He took the tip of a hoe out of the toolbox and screwed it onto his arm. Then he dug into the soil with the tool. The dirt sprayed out on all sides.

  “The ground is soft here,” he commented. “Did you notice that?”

  He hacked a bit more on the ground, moving northward. Suddenly, the metal of the hoe met something hard, which caused it to bounce back. “Hah!” he said, “here it is.”

  Nuria joined him. She took out her hoe, too, and helped him to expose the structure.

  It became clear after just 15 minutes that they were digging up something elongated, a kind of wall. It was about 20 centimeters thick and consisted of a material that they had not yet analyzed. Every now and then Nuria put a few flakes into a sample container. She planned to feed the samples to the analyzer in the spaceship. The hard material could only be chipped off with great effort using the hoes.

  Soon their small excavation was half a meter deep and two meters long. It was wonderful to be able to work diligently without becoming exhausted. Occasionally Erik stopped digging and pushed the waste material aside. Nuria took samples of the waste material as well.

  “It’s just caked dust,” Erik said.

  “If we take samples of regolith from different depths, we can explore the recent history of the planet,” Nuria said.

  He let her take the samples and pushed another hill of waste material behind their dig. When he returned, he noticed lines on the exposed structure. “Wait a minute, Nuria,” he said.

  She paused, and he pointed to a line. Nuria’s AV scratched its chin. “I think I know what we’re looking at,” she said.

  She excavated the Venusian soil in such a fashion that they could follow the course of the line. Of course. Erik had thought of that, too. The line split and formed a honeycomb configuration in combination with other lines. What they had already noticed on a large scale was repeated on a smaller scale.

  “Self-similar structures,” Erik said. “Do you think this is a construction?”

  “I don’t know. Wouldn’t it need to display more variation if it were artificial?”

  “Suppose an alien discovers a human bathroom. Would he think it’s not made by humans, because the tiles are laid regularly?”

  “A bad comparison,” Nuria said. “Let’s dig up more. The more of this we manage to view, the better.”

  Three hours had passed. The sun had not seemed to move a millimeter, but Erik’s sense of time told him that it was now evening. He sat down in front of the strange wall and touched it. Erik tried to go back in time to when someone or something formed this wall. Were they individuals who worked here with a hammer and a chisel? Probably not, since he and Nuria would have found traces of them. And the structures were old, but not old enough to have been in existence when Venus was still habitable.

  But what natural process produced such patterns? Why was the honeycomb structure repeated on a large scale as well as on a small scale? Were, by chance, two different processes at work that produced similar results, or was there a conscious purpose behind this?

  Erik stood up. “We need a whole piece of the thing to place under the microscope. Not just the dust.”

  “Are you surmising that the honeycombs repeat themselves at a microscopic scale?”

  “Exactly, Nuria.”

  “But even if that were the case, that would not tell us yet what this is, or how it came into existence.”

  “No, it would just be even more puzzling.”

  Nuria laughed. “I like that,” she said, starting to chisel off a piece of the wall.

  June 13, 2079, Venus Base

  Peter took off his pressure suit and sat down at the table. “If we are dealing with what used to be a living creature, that would mean that the quasicrystals are some sort of cells.”

  “Yes, why not? We have no knowledge of any creature that has sulfur-based cells, but that doesn’t mean such a creature can’t exist,” Marchenko said.

  “I’ll take a look at the material in the spectrometer.” He took a scalpel and tried to break off a piece of the material, but was unable to.

  A hand was placed on his shoulder from behind. It startled him, and he whipped around—Katarina. He looked at her with annoyance.

  “Should I tread loudly in the future?” she asked.

  She could tell from her tone of voice that she genuinely meant it. “Of course not,” he answered, unable to suppress a grin. “You just startled me a bit.”

  “There’s a lot of that material in the box under the table,” she said.

  He lifted the box onto the table and opened it. It emitted a swirl of dust into the air, which made him cough. “My goodness, this is really dusty!”

  “Maria chipped off some samples with a hammer and a chisel and then crushed them,” Katarina said. “But always with the help of a piece of cloth, so that she didn’t make too much noise.”

  That was so sweet. Apparently, she had not wanted to disturb him while he was asleep. “How is she?” he asked. He should have long since inquired about her!

  “I’m increasingly unsure.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “Her body temperature has been fluctuating a lot, between thirty-five and forty degrees. But right now, it’s just under thirty-five-and-a-half degrees,” Katarina said.

  “That doesn’t sound encouraging.” First, a high fever. Then such a low temperature? He hoped they would soon find the cause and be able to help her.

  “I’m worried, too,” Marchenko said. “Maria’s immune system seems to be working at full speed, and the phases of hypothermia are not what one would expect with this level of immune system activity.”

  He needed to distract himself from his worries. Peter took a sample from the box and took it to the spectrometer and had the results two minutes later. “A varied bunch of elements,” he mumbled. “Look at this, Marchenko!”

  “I don’t have access to the spectrometer.”

  Peter connected his communicator to the interface of the spectrometer.

  “Sulf
ur is the main component, and there are many other light elements, and elements with medium molecular weight,” Marchenko said.

  “But oxygen is barely detectable,” Peter said.

  “That’s not surprising on Venus.”

  “Maria’s blood pressure is fluctuating dangerously,” Katarina said.

  “I need the data, quick!” Marchenko said. The robot connected to the bed. “Her heart is racing!” Marchenko said.

  “She’s dying!” Katarina cried. “Her heartbeat is barely detectable!”

  “The emergency kit, Peter!” Marchenko ordered.

  Peter sprinted to the kitchen, but the kit wasn’t in sight. “Where is the damn thing?” he shouted.

  “Box 37. Heartbeat back to normal.”

  Box 37 had been stowed inside another box on the bottom shelf. He pulled out the box, opened it, and took out the emergency kit.

  “Hurry up, bring the emergency kit here!” Katarina cried.

  He had never heard Katarina call out in such a shrill voice. Peter ran to her with the kit. “What’s wrong?”

  “She almost went into respiratory arrest, but it’s slowly getting better,” Katarina said, seeming to have overcome her panic.

  “Wait!” the AI said.

  Peter could see that Maria was breathing more rapidly. How could he help her? “Now she’s hyperventilating,” he said. He had to stay calm—panic wouldn’t be of any use. He studied all of the data pertaining to Maria’s body, past and present, in the hologram that his communicator created.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the AI. “Maria’s body functions go from one extreme to the other, but never all at the same time.”

  “This reminds me of a calibration process,” Peter said, shaking his head because the thought was so absurd.

  “Me, too,” Marchenko affirmed. “At the moment, all values are normal. We must wait. I don’t think her condition is life-threatening. But Katarina and I will now monitor her constantly.”

  “Do you think I can lie down for a moment?” Peter asked. He didn’t know if he could fall asleep given the current situation, but he was utterly exhausted.

  “Do that,” Katarina said in a voice that brooked no argument.

  Peter smiled and turned around. He walked down the corridor toward his quarters.

  “Maria is awake,” Marchenko said.

  Peter ran back to her bed. Finally! I hope she’s feeling better!

  Maria lay on the bed with her eyes open and breathing normally, but otherwise motionless. She opened her mouth. “Meat!” she blurted out, “I want meat and nuts. And, above all, that delicious dried fruit!”

  June 14, 2079, Venusian Surface

  Nuria was still sitting at the kitchen counter, enjoying muesli with fabricated milk, while Erik was reconnecting with his AV. He suddenly found himself in total darkness and was confused for a short moment, because they were still supposed to be on the day side, and then he realized that the AV had automatically switched to sleep mode. He reactivated its sensors—and opened his eyes on Venus.

  It was fantastic. Erik was seated, leaning against an ancient wall covered in symbols, on the hot surface of an alien planet. The sun was a bright spot in the sky. Vapor clouds were spreading outward above the nearby volcano. For a moment it seemed like a movie set, because he did not feel the heat, and the clouds were so unnaturally high they could be the studio ceiling.

  He waved his arm and the illusion disappeared immediately, for the movement cost him an extraordinary effort. Thanks to his artificial muscles, he could even measure it. It was not like moving in water, but the air felt almost viscous. His database spat out the observation that the air’s density lay between that of tungsten hexafluoride and isopentane. However, this was a wide range, because WF6 was five times thinner than the air here, and C5H12 was ten times as dense as the air here. As a human, Erik thought, the feeling is simply unparalleled.

  He stood up slowly. Nuria’s AV was still sitting idle, probably freshening up. She always took a bit longer in the morning, but they did not have much time today. The spaceship, from which they controlled the AVs, would dive into the radio shadow below the horizon at about midday. The radio connection to the AVs would break off, and their robot bodies would have to survive alone and motionless for almost two Earth days before they could control them again. They could do nothing about that, because the spaceship could not just stop—it was carried along by the fast-moving cloud layer.

  He knelt in front of the wall and hacked into the ground with the tool attached to his arm. How far beneath the surface did the strange wall reach? Erik had the feeling that the answer would help them to understand the nature of the wall phenomenon. He worked as quickly as he could, hoping they might know more before the time came when the connection would be interrupted.

  There was a sudden burning sensation in his right eye. He tried to ignore it, but the burning became stronger. Did his AV have a defect? That would pose a big problem! Then he realized it was his own pain. Sweat was running from his forehead into his eye. He briefly snapped out of the AV and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his uniform. When he returned, he heard a crunching sound.

  It was Nuria, who was standing next to him. “You want to dig downward?” she asked.

  “Yes, I want to know where the wall ends.”

  “Good idea.” She cleared away the waste material he had dug up and then hacked into the ground herself. “I’m digging an entry point,” she said. “I think we’ll have to dig at least three meters down. We have to tackle this professionally. You dig at the base of the wall, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Agreed,” Erik said.

  “Spaceship to miners,” Ethan said after a while. “How is your work progressing?”

  Erik did not look up. If Ethan was contacting them of his own volition, it meant that the spaceship would soon reach the radio shadow. That was not a good thing, because they had not yet found the bottom of the wall. By now they had reached a depth of three and a half meters. Erik’s AV was working in a narrow channel. The bottom was almost completely dark. He was glad that he did not have to work here in his own body. The AV did not need a comfortable working position, and when it was dark, it merely switched on its lamp.

  “When do we have to leave?” Nuria asked.

  Without her, he really would not have achieved any of this. They had barely talked to each other, but communication had nevertheless been excellent. It was good, he realized, that they had trained together for so long.

  “You have fifteen minutes left,” Ethan said.

  That was not enough. Erik hammered a little more quickly on the ground below him, even though he knew that Nuria would not be able to keep up with removing the waste material. He would have to come to terms with the two days of waiting. They would sit around idle, whereas... No, it was useless to get upset. They had not yet been able to analyze the samples Nuria took. He hoped that would occupy her during the two days they would spend on the night side.

  “Come on, Nuria, we should switch the AVs to sleep mode,” he said.

  He stood up and climbed upward, out of the hole.

  Nuria pointed to a boulder nearby that was roughly half a meter high. “We can sit there.”

  Erik sauntered to the spot, sat down, and leaned against the rock. He looked at the bright spot in the sky and then shifted his gaze to the horizon. The spaceship, where his real body was, must be somewhere there. It was a strange and ambivalent feeling, watching yourself say goodbye to yourself...

  June 14, 2079, Venus Base

  Peter sensed it, felt it, and thought it. It came from his head, and yet it was alien to him. The thoughts that entered his mind weren’t his, yet they were real.

  “Wake up. You’re hungry!” He opened his eyes. Katarina was standing next to his bed, smiling at him.

  “Your smile is as beautiful as always,” he said, and felt a little better.

  “Eat!” the robot said, holding out a bowl of dri
ed fruit.

  “How do you know I’m hungry?”

  “Like Maria, you slept for seventeen hours, and you went through everything she did.”

  “And the dried fruit?” Peter asked.

  “Since she’s been awake, she’s been eating meat, nuts, and especially dried fruit.”

  “Funny that I like the stuff so much. I used to hate it!”

  “The best thing is for you to first take a shower, and I’ll make you a decent meal.”

  His hand jerked back. Why was the water so hot? This is unbearable! He turned the tap to cold, but still the stream of water burned. He quickly dried off, got dressed, and went to the communal lounge, where Katarina had already prepared the meal.

  “Something’s wrong with the shower setting,” he said.

  “It was off-kilter when I was in the shower, too,” Maria said, taking a piece of dried fruit from Peter’s plate.

  “Hands off! That’s my food!” Peter could barely stop himself from smacking her hand. He clasped his hands. Maria’s behavior had made him furious.

  “Be glad you still have something on your plate,” Maria said, her eyes emitting sparks of anger. “I’m hungry, too, but there is no proper food here!”

  “You have eaten eight times in the last seventeen hours, Maria,” Katerina said as she moved to shield Peter’s plate. “The supplies of dried fruit are almost gone, but the nanofabricators are already working on replenishing the stock.”

  Peter took a bite. The dried fruit was delicious. Why have I never noticed that before?

  “I want some too!” Maria screamed, pouncing on Peter. But before Maria could reach out to grab his plate, Katarina intervened.

  “I’m sorry,” the robot said, taking hold of Maria in a special grip and leading her to her room. Maria fought and called for help. But she deserved this—she had wanted to steal his food!