Colt grinned. Sharol, after a moment, grinned back and hefted his gun. It felt good, Colt thought, to have a gun again. You always knew where you were, with a gun.
“Welcome, Roog of Lemuria, risen again after millennia!” They stepped around the control unit. The idol had been lowered onto the deck. Its eyes had not lost their weird, ethereal glow. In the distance, a false sun, growing closer. Van Huisen spread open his arms. “You who were worshipped as a god,” he said, “will now meet one who has lived as one!” And so saying, he stepped forward, and embraced the monstrous stone statue, placing his lips on the idol’s own in a lustful, obscene kiss.
“Now?” Sharol said.
“Now!” Colt said.
They stepped out in unison and began to fire.
The ReplicAnts were taken by surprise if such creatures can be said to be capable of surprise. The beams hissed through the air, agitating water molecules as they passed. The air filled with steam. ReplicAnts dropped. Others turned, firing. Colt knew they could not win, that this was suicide, yet a savage joy sang through him as he fired, rolled, grabbed a weapon from the hands of a downed cyborg, and continued to mow down Van Huisen’s guard. This was revenge, and revenge was a dish best served with guns.
Van Huisen still had his arms wrapped around the statue. Now he turned his head back, to look at them, an irritated frown crossing his face. That was what Colt always remembered, afterward: that petulant look on the Butcher of Europa’s face, a moment before it changed forever. At first, it was simple confusion, then a nameless terror entered the man’s eyes, and milky clouds began to pour into his retina. His body shuddered, spasming uncontrollably, and he began to scream.
Colt was cornered by two ReplicAnts, his arm and face bleeding and burned: he faced them, ready to die.
But no shot came. Colt stared at the ReplicAnts, but they were unmoving. Just ahead Van Huisen was still screaming, fused into the rock. Colt said, “Sharol?”
“Yes?” came the reply, from the other side of the platform.
“Are you still alive?”
“Yes.” There was a short silence. “You?”
“I … yes?”
“Sure?”
Colt shrugged. He grabbed the beam gun from the nearest ReplicAnt, smashed in the creature’s face, then fired in a long beam, low and wide, turning, leaving around him a circle of corpses.
“I’m pretty sure!” he said.
In the distance, there was the sound of an explosion, like thunder, but it was not thunder. Colt thought that he could see the sun, but that was impossible, on Venus. In the water, the Venusian swampmen and -women stared up at the two of them, mutely. “Sharol?”
“Yes?”
“They’re staring.”
“Right.”
Sharol came and joined him, cutting a swathe of dead and broken ReplicAnts in his wake. “You!” Colt said, addressing the Venusians in the water. They looked up at him in mute incomprehension. “Shoo!” Colt said. “Shoo!”
“Get out of here!” Sharol said. Still they did not move. He sighed, adjusted the setting on his gun, and began to fire into the water. “Go away! Get back to your villages! Hurry!”
A panic broke in the water, and the Venusians, as one, began to swim to shore. Colt and Sharol, standing side by side in the glare of the one remaining floodlight, watched them come ashore like a dark tide. Soon they were gone amidst the pyramids.
The sudden silence was broken by a human laugh, the sound of hands, clapping. “Bravo,” the voice said. Colt turned, slowly. Van Huisen was standing beside the idol, but the idol’s eyes no longer shone, and there was something indescribably alien and disgusting in Van Huisen’s face: something that used to be his eyes. “Bravo!”
“It’s still here?” Sharol said.
“Shoot it,” Colt said.
The face that had belonged to Van Huisen smiled. Colt and Sharol opened fire. Van Huisen staggered back, still smiling. Then he stopped and breathed deep. His chest inflated. He seemed to grow bigger and meaner in that time.
He took a step forward.
He was unharmed.
“Roog …” he said, softly. His tongue snaked out, red and fleshy like a Martian cactus. He licked his lips. His teeth were like stone, and there was mud leaking from his eyes and ears. He opened his mouth wide. “Roog!” he roared. His tongue snaked out and continued to emerge, a vast red snake. It looped around Sharol and pulled him to the ground. Colt fired, but the beams bounced harmlessly off of the monster. “Sharol!”
“Run! Save yourself!”
There was the sound of an explosion, closer this time. Waves lashed the platform, almost upending Colt. Van Huisen grew bigger, and bigger still. His tongue, a red pulsating tentacle, tightened over Sharol’s helpless body. Van Huisen’s weight was making the platform lean; the crane was tilting alarmingly, swinging as the platform rocked. Colt fired, helplessly, sweat pouring down his face. He threw down the gun and ran to his friend.
“Roog! Roog! Roog!”
“Go …” Sharol whispered. He reached out a hand, stroked Colt’s cheek. “Colt … go.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Save yourself.”
Colt shook his head. There was sweat in his eyes. He blinked. The Roog was by now enormous. Van Huisen’s body bloated outward, muscles and skin and blood vessels stretched. He towered over them, as tall as the crane now. “I am Roog! Lemuria,” he cried, “shall rise again!” Red tongues lashed out of his enormous mouth, tentacles reaching out for Colt, sinking into the lake, questing, hungering … Colt was going to get taken, the ancient god was going to devour them both. He squeezed Sharol’s hand. “At least we found it,” he said, trying to smile. “The treasure.”
“Fool,” Sharol said. The breath was leaving him. The monster’s tongue wrapped itself around Colt. There was no escape. It was slimy and wet and hot. He felt its pull, tried to fight against it. Overhead, the giant risen god’s laugh boomed across the sky.
No, Colt realized. It was a different sound, intruding on his consciousness. It was the sound of explosions, and the air felt hot and dry. The Roog stopped laughing, its head turned this way and that. It looked annoyed.
“Who dares disturb the mighty Roog?” he said. His voice had the petulance of Van Huisen still in it. His tentacle eased the pressure on Colt; just a little. He looked up.
The sun burned in the purple Venusian sky. It dispelled clouds and illuminated the night, casting shadows and reflections on the water. It was the sun the blind poet Rhysling had spoken of when he described feeling its warmth on his skin and knowing that he was back home, amidst the green hills of Earth.
And it cried. It cried out in song. It was not the sun, but …
“Sun Eater …” Sharol whispered. Colt’s eyes filled with tears as he stared into the glare, saw, amidst the flames, the lizardine body, the leathery wings of the Sun Eater. It turned enormous diamond eyes on Colt as though it could see every part of him, which perhaps it could. Then it gave a cry of anger and rushed at the bloated god.
The tentacles eased off Colt and Sharol as the Roog turned to his attacker, his mouth opening in rage. Tentacles whipped through the air, trying to wrap around the Sun Eater, but the heat from the flying creature burned them clean off and the Roog cried with anger and pain. Chunks of tongue fell down to the water, red and hissing. The Sun Eater flew at the Roog, gouging deep chunks of meat out of its grotesque human shape, which splashed down into the water, as large as pyramid blocks. Colt grabbed Sharol’s shoulders. The Roog’s attention was off them. Sharol had lost consciousness. Colt began to drag him to the edge of the platform.
Overhead, the Sun Eater was a ball of flame, but the Roog had stretched his massive lips into a nasty smile, and a new tongue appeared and licked his red flesh. His giant hands reached for the crane and tore it free. The Sun Eater, turning in a graceful swirl, was coming back at the Roog. The Roog screamed incoherent laughter and rage and swung the giant crane like a bat.
Colt could only watch, in horrified incomprehension, as the crane connected with the Sun Eater’s body with a sickening crunch. For a moment, there was silence, and the sun seemed suspended in the air. Then it fell, like dusk, slowly and inexorably, and hit the deck. The platform shook and the water rose and fell on Colt and Sharol. The swamp water found the Sun Eater and extinguished it. It was dying. Without its light, it was just a beast, one no longer even capable of flight. It turned its diamond eyes on Colt and blinked, once. Colt crawled toward it. Above his head, the Roog was laughing, laughing, growing bigger and bigger into the sky. Soon his head was level with the clouds, his legs extended down into the swamp floor. He had forgotten them.
“I’m sorry,” Colt whispered. He reached out, stroked the Sun Eater’s reptilian head. It felt warm but no longer burning. He withdrew his hand.
Then the Sun Eater imploded.
9.
IT WAS A SILENT THING. THE CREATURE’S ENTIRE MASS COMPRESSED inward, eyes and scales and wings broke up and shrank, inward.
Colt stared at the death of the Sun Eater.
Where it had been, there remained a softly glowing egg.
10.
HE CARRIED SHAROL ON HIS BACK, SWIMMING TO THE SHORE. Sharol had recovered enough to walk, by then. They leaned on each other as they walked away from the temple complex. Behind them the giant Roog was smashing up the ancient pyramids. It was like a child, playing with its toys. Soon, if it weren’t stopped, it would take over the world.
“What … happened back there?” Sharol asked.
“I saw a god rising,” Colt said. “And a Sun Eater die. Come. We must hurry.”
Sharol did not ask why. They walked away from the ancient temple, along the riverbank, before departing from it into the jungle.
“I can’t … go any farther,” Sharol said.
“You have to. Just over the next hill.”
And Sharol would comply, and Colt would make him go over just one more hill. They were not like the green hills of Earth, but they were hills, all the same, and hard to climb. Hills often are.
“You need medical help,” Colt said. “Lucille Town is three days away, by my estimate.”
“What difference does it make?” Sharol said. “We lost.”
Colt shrugged. “We are still alive,” he answered.
At the top of the next hill they stopped and rested. They had a view over the jungle and the river, and in the distance they could see the swamp and the ruined temple. The Roog’s head was lost in the clouds now. Soon he would be visible from space.
“No wonder the Atlanteans died out,” Sharol said.
“Yes,” Colt said.
He smiled, a private smile. “Look,” he said.
They saw it before they heard it. The sound traveled slower than the light, so that, when they saw it, it was in total silence.
It was hard to say, afterward, exactly what it was they saw.
Certainly, there was a flash of terrible brightness.
The Roog’s legs seemed to give way under him, suddenly.
It was the brightness of the sun, turning everything white. And then the Roog was no longer there. Sound followed, a rolling thunder, traveling for miles. The light dimmed, only slightly. The flames rose upward, smoke erupting in a vast towering mushroom cloud. Make no mistake, humanity has conquered space before; and out of that prehistory there came to us the ancient myths of the phoenix, resurrected in fire from ash, for such a creature could never have evolved on Earth.
It seemed to Colt afterward that before the cloud dispersed he saw a brightness, as beautiful as a bird, born out of the flames, rise and take off, into the air. The Sun Eater, being reborn in flame, like the phoenix.
They sat on the hilltop and watched the sun rise over the Venusian skies.
11.
IN THE DISTANCE, FAINT AND FADING, A FINAL WHISPER IN their minds.
Roog…
Then silence.
12.
COLT WAS PLAYING VENUSIAN HI-LO AND WINNING WHEN SHAROL came into the bar. He was limping, holding on to a crutch, but he was smiling all the same. Colt smiled back.
They had traveled through swampland and jungle to Lucille Town, under the shadow of the volcanoes. Neither was in good shape when they finally made it. But they had made it. That was the important thing.
The city prospered. A lumberyard was operating at one end of the town, and the men were busy clearing away the trees. The houses were slowly being converted into permanent structures, surrounded by clean, white picket fences. A new road was being built, linking the settlement to Port Smith. Everything seemed orderly, prosperous, and safe.
One day, Colt thought, all of Venus would be like this. The colonists would drain the swamps, chop down the forests, build roads and towns all over the planet. Such a world would have no room in it for Dwellers or Sun Eaters, the old temples would become roadside attractions, the old gods would die—and such a world would have no place in it for a man like Colt.
One day, Colt thought. But not today.
“Got room for one more?” Sharol asked. Colt moved his chair and the man beside him, a gruff marine, did the same. Sharol pulled over a chair and sat down. He put his hand, briefly, on Colt’s.
“Deal me in,” he said.
PAUL McAULEY
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.
McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and the revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Space Opera, as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence—a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set 10 million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars—Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent books are a new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, a major retrospective collection, A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985–2011, and a new novel, Evening’s Empires.
Here he takes us to a remote mining station on the rugged coast of Venus’s mysterious, fog-shrouded equatorial continent, where the well-armed miners are on guard for an attack by monsters—for all the good it will do them.
Planet of Fear
PAUL McAULEY
ACROSS THE GLISTENING SLICK OF THE SUBTROPICAL SARGASSO, amongst shoals and archipelagos of bladderweed, several thousand sunfish floated in intersecting circles of churning foam. They were big, the sunfish, big humped discs ten or fifteen or even twenty meters across, patched with clusters of barnacles and thatched with purple-brown thickets of strapweed and whipweed, and all around them soldier remoras flailed and fought, flashing and writhing in frothing, blood-blackened water. A quadrocopter drone hung high above this shambles like a lonely seabird, avid camera eyes transmitting images to the ekranoplan anchored several kilometers beyond the sargasso’s southern edge.
In the close warmth of the fire-control bay, bathed in the radiance of three big flatscreens, Katya Ignatova asked the petty officer piloting the drone to lock its cameras on a particular pair of sunfish. They were match
ed in size, each about twelve meters in diameter, and the fringes of their feeding tentacles had interlaced and fused and were now contracting, drawing them together. Dead and dying soldier remoras bobbed around them: slim, silvery torpedoes with chunks torn out of their flanks, shovel jaws gaping, eye clusters filmed white. Venusian fish were armored in bony chain mail, had external gills and horizontal tail fins resembling whale flukes, but they possessed swim bladders. Like terrestrial fish, their corpses floated.
The drone pilot said, “Such fury. Such waste.”
“Soldiers attack everything that gets too close to their sibling,” Katya said. “Including other sunfish. They can’t mate until their soldiers have been neutralized. But the dead aren’t wasted. Their flesh feeds the ecosystem where the next generation develops.”
She hunched forward as the pair of sunfish began to jab at each other with the spears of their spermatophores, and asked the drone pilot if he could get a close-up of the action.
“No problem,” he said, and made delicate adjustments to the joystick that controlled his little craft.
The views on the screens tilted and shifted, stabilized again. Katya prompted the pilot to zoom in on the tip of a calcified spear that scratched amongst drifts of purple-brown weed before abruptly driving forward.
“I believe they call that the money shot,” the pilot, Arkadi Sarantsev, said.
He was a slender, cynical fellow in his midtwenties, a few years younger than Katya. She had noticed that he kept apart from the companionable clamor in the mess, reading a vivid paperback thriller as he forked food from his tray. Sitting close to him in the television light, she could smell the cola-nut oil he’d used to sleek back his black hair.
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