Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  It’s an existential headache, and not just existential.

  The main thing Julie suffered was a profound career change, from explorer-scientist to laboratory animal. Or perhaps a new kind of explorer.

  As far as researchers have found, all she lost was a portion of long-term memory. She could still do calculus and higher math, but had to relearn the multiplication tables and long division for them to work.

  We spent many hours picking up where we had left off, on Farside a few years ago. At first I was helping her to reclaim her memory. Then we started making new memories of our own.

  So now I’m living with a woman who is, I suppose, technically not human. That hasn’t stopped us from making a couple of copies.

  So far they seem to work all right.

  STEPHEN LEIGH

  In the tense story that follows, a man who lost almost everything on Venus returns to the planet that had nearly cost him his life, and to the woman who had urged him on to destruction, to give them both another shot at finishing the job …

  Stephen Leigh is the author of the Neweden series, which consists of Slow Fall to Dawn, Dance of the Hag, and A Quiet of Stone. He’s also the author of the Mictlan series, consisting of Dark Water’s Embrace and Speaking Stones, and has contributed six novels to the Ray Bradbury Presents series, some with John L. Miller, including Dinosaur World, Dinosaur Planet, Dinosaur Warriors, and Dinosaur Conquest. His stand-alone novels include The Bones of God, The Crystal Memory, The Woods, and The Abraxas Marvel Circus; he has also contributed to the Wild Cards series and the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City series, and has written as S. L. Farrell and Matthew Farrell. His short stories have been collected in A Rain of Pebbles and A Tapestry of Twelve Tales. His most recent novel is Assassins’ Dawn, a book in the Neweden series. Leigh lives with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Bones of Air, Bones of Stone

  STEPHEN LEIGH

  TAKE A SMALL ROCK, TOSS IT INTO A ROTATING CYLINDER, AND pour in abrasives. Tumble the mess for several days, while the grit gnaws at the hard edges and scrubs the rounding surfaces. What eventually emerges from the harsh chrysalis of the tumbler is rock subdued and transformed, shimmering and polished like molten glass, all the hidden colors and veins revealed …

  Somewhere in my early teens, my parents gave me a rock-polishing kit. I went pretty quickly through the provided assortment of pebbles, pleased with what came from my growling, slow cylinder but bored with the tedious, long hours needed for the result. Like most kids that age, I preferred instant gratification. I would almost certainly have set the polishing kit aside like every other hobby of the month I’d owned, except that my grandmother, Evako, came up to my room one evening not long after.

  “Here, Tomio,” she said, handing me a drab, ordinary piece of dark rock. “Run this through your noisy machine for me.”

  “Sure,” I said—we were all used to the brusque demands of the Norkohn Shuttles matriarch, just as she was used to obedience. I tossed the rock up and down in my hand. It was nothing I’d have chosen: a chunk of undistinguished granite. “Why don’t you get some opal from the gardener, Obaasan,” I suggested, not wanting her to be disappointed with what I was certain would be mediocre results. “It’d look a lot better.”

  She sniffed, taking the rock back from me and holding it in her fingers. I remember that her fingers were thin and wrinkled already, with knuckles swollen and large with arthritis that would only worsen as the years went on. “Obviously you don’t know what this is,” she told me.

  “It’s granite,” I told her. “And it’s about as common as dirt.”

  She shook her head at me. “This is Akiko. My obaasan.”

  I could feel my brow wrinkling. “I don’t understand, Obaasan.”

  “So I see.” Obaasan Evako sighed and sat on my bed, twirling the rock in the afternoon sun coming through the window. “Akiko had a wonderful garden in our villa in Chincha Alta. I grew up there, and that’s where I always came back to visit her. On my last visit, just before she died, I took this stone from the garden—not an important stone, not any different from a thousand others there. Yet … every time I look at it, I can see Akiko again, and that garden. As long as the rock lasts, so will that image in my mind.” She had been speaking more to the sunlight and the rock than to me; now she turned and fixed her gaze on me, as sharp as the flaked edges of the rock. “How can this rock be less than beautiful, with the truth and memories it holds?”

  She didn’t say anything else, just placed the pebble on the cover of the bed and left the room, knowing that I’d do what she asked. And, of course, I did. It took several days to give the rock the right sheen, to take all the edges from it. When I finally took it from the tumbler, a pointillistic swirl of colors rolled in the palm of my hand and I found myself turning it over and over, marveling at the complex play of hue and shade.

  Obaasan Evako, when I gave it to her, nearly smiled. “Now it looks more like her than ever,” she said. “Now I can see the true beauty of her that was hidden in the stone.”

  Ever since then, for many years, I would take common pebbles from places that were important to me at the time and try to uncover whatever gift they held. Many times the results were disappointing, an utter waste of time. But a few of them I’ve kept with me, wherever I’ve gone:

  —a pale pink crystal shot with fractures that comes from the garden of the Norkohn estate on Cape Hinomisaki near Izumo—a piece of home that pulls Nippon and especially Shimane Prefecture up from its resting place in my mind …

  —a thick needle of dark gray granite from the hills of New Hampshire, where I went to university, the subtle, rich satin of its surface never failing to conjure autumn on the east coast of North America …

  —a nearly round ball packed with fine, crazed white lines from Tycho Crater on the moon: my first trip offworld, the quick panic of stepping outside unprotected from vacuum except by my space suit, the euphoria of bounding in one-quarter gravity across dusty plains …

  —a red-orange marble with streaks of rich brown: I plucked that from Olympus Mons on Mars during my ascent with Avariel. I thought then that I’d met the one true love of my life with her …

  —an ebony, glassy spheroid speckled with blue-black highlights: the beach at Blackstone Bay. That stone was also Avariel.

  That stone was Venus.

  I’d not expected to be back on Venus ever again. I thought that all I would ever retain of Venus and Avariel was that fragment of polished lava.

  The single, precipitous main street of Port Blackstone was raucous and loud, and more crowded than I remembered. There were even a few shreeliala on the streets, too, something that when I was last here—a decade and a half ago—wasn’t common. Back then, if you saw shreeliala—the sentient Venusian race who lived under the waves of the Always Sea, the endless and shallow ocean that covers their world—it was either down at Undersea Port or if you were out on the Always Sea. I could smell their cinnamon-laden exhalations as I passed them, sucking in seawater from the bubblers strapped between the double line of fins down their backs.

  The buildings I passed on the way, clinging like limpets to the steep side of the volcanic island that was the single landmass on Venus, seemed weary and exhausted. The fresh paint that had been smeared on them seemed like the too-thick makeup on an ancient whore, enhancing rather than hiding age.

  The smell was the same, though. The winds that smeared the low ranks of the clouds over Port Blackstone smelled of the Always Sea: an odor of sulfurous brine, a stench of rotting vegetation; the cinnamon of the shreeliala. The air was as thick as I remembered its being, heavily oxygenated and laden with moisture. There was no sun; there was never a sun during Venus’s day, only the smeared, unfocused light that the clouds allowed through.

  And the rain …

  If the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, the humans who live on Venus have nearly as many words for the types of rain that the eternal clouds spew down on them. It was raining now, as
it usually did—what the locals called a sheeter: a needlelike, wind-driven spray that was part rain and part foam ripped from the ocean waves. The sheeter hissed and fumed against my rainshield as it pummeled the buildings on either side of me. Lightning shimmered blue-white through the clouds overhead, sending brief, racing shadows across the street; the thunder followed a half second later, crackling and loud enough to rattle the windows in the nearest buildings.

  I walked down Blackstone’s lone, rain-slick street from the flat plateau, where the supply shuttles landed on the shoulder of the volcano, toward the port proper, my luggage rolling along behind me on its autocart. At the far end of the street, amongst the piers and jetties and the eternal wave-spray, the street finally plunged under the long, racing swells: Undersea Port, where the human world met that of the shreeliala.

  Maybe it was the relentless and grim dimness of the day, maybe it was my expectations, maybe it was the oppressive heat—have I mentioned the heat yet?—but Venus and Blackstone seemed less than enthusiastic in welcoming me back from Earth after over a decade. A group of youths, dressed in thin laborer’s clothing, ran by me in the rain, shouting half-heard words in their thick Venusian accents that might have been curses; shopkeepers leaned in the doorways of their businesses, staring at me like the intruder I was.

  I knew why they stared …

  It’s not often that you see a person with field prostheses, especially not in an age where limbs can usually (“usually”… such a comforting word unless it doesn’t apply to you) be regrown. The emptiness between my hips and shoes were twin-shaped fields, the controls implanted along my spine. The shoes—the far end of the field—moved as if attached to bone, sinew, and flesh, which showed my years of practice. In the correct light, you can see the heat-waver of the fields; an imaginative person can sense the flexings and almost glimpse the transparent legs.

  Almost.

  I would wear long trousers and have it appear that my body is whole, albeit somewhat stiff, but why play that charade? Obaasan Evako always scolded us for telling unvoiced lies, for pretending to be something we weren’t. Besides, no one wears much clothing on Venus: it’s too damned hot and too damned wet for that. So instead, I wore shorts which just covered the stumps of my thighs, which means that I looked like the torso of a dismembered body floating ghostlike a meter above the ground. I wondered how many of those here would think back fifteen years and remember my face from the newscasts of the time. Probably none of them looked at my face at all.

  Fifteen years ago, I’d left my legs behind on Venus. I’d left behind a lot more, as well. I ran fingertips over the cool, smooth surface of the stones in my pocket, and when I found a familiar shape, I pulled it out. The stone, polished and about as big as the tip of my little finger, was satin black and glassy, flecked with a blue that was almost black itself. I turned it in my fingers, looking at all the familiar swirls of its polished surface, then shoved it back in my pocket.

  My last stop had been the Blackstone Library and the data terminals there. Avariel was here, somewhere. When the Green Council announced that Blackstone would be reopened to offworld traffic, I’d known she would come here. I’d been afraid she would. Now I’d seen the permits from the Green Council, and I knew what she was planning to do.

  And that scared me …

  The night was strained with some invisible tension, and those outside glanced up at the eternal clouds of the planet as if they might see some doom about to descend on them. I’d probably find my own, I was certain, before too much longer. I left the streets gladly.

  As I entered the hostel’s lobby, the owner opened one eye and blinked at me from behind the desk. From the shifting blur of color in his left eye and a haze of tinny sound around him, I knew he was watching something on his implant. He’d also “gone native”—those who had decided to make Venus their permanent home often had surgical modification, and I could see the healing tracks of gill covers along the proprietor’s neck.

  He snarled something in my direction.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, spread those legs, you bitch …”

  Not having legs, I assumed that wasn’t directed to me and waited as he grumbled to his feet. His grimy fingers (new webbing set between them) scrabbled on the grimier plastic of the registration desk. “You need a room?” he mumbled, only slightly louder this time. He reached below the counter, then slapped down a registration pad. His hand stayed on it, fingers splayed so that the speckled webbing was prominent. “Usually, we’re closed by now,” he stated. “I stayed up past my usual time ’cause I knew there was a passenger on the shuttle.”

  His right eye stared, vague shapes moved in his left. A chorus of insects moaned around him. “Nice of you to do that,” I ventured.

  “I’m missing the best part of my favorite show now.” A forefinger tapped the pad.

  I fumbled in my pocket—the one without stones—and fished out the coins I found there. I placed them alongside the pad. His hand spider-crawled over to the money, and I put my hand on the pad. It beeped and chirped. “Room’s just down the hall,” the hostel owner said.

  I nodded to the owner; his duty accomplished and tip secured, he was already lost in his entertainment; he didn’t even notice my lack of legs. His eyes were closed, his lips moved with the verse of some unheard song.

  I went down the hall to my room.

  I stayed long enough to unpack a few things, then hobbled out of the hostel toward the lone Blackstone tavern, fumbling with anxious fingers at the five or six polished stones in my pocket. Fifteen years ago, the establishment had been called “By The Sea,” and Avariel and I had eaten and gotten drunk there a few times before we left the port. The sign outside the establishment proclaimed that it was now “Venus Genetrix”—Mother Venus. I doubted that anyone here either knew or cared. I was just glad to leave the wet, steep streets and the suspicious stares for the bar.

  “Fuck, look at that,” someone said as I entered, in an inebriated stage whisper. Half the patrons of the tavern glanced around at me with that, and in the blur of faces, I saw her. In an alcove to the back, she sat in the dim light. Seeing Avariel reminded me of too many things. I wanted to hide. I wanted to run.

  Running is one thing I’m no longer capable of; walking’s the best I can manage.

  Instead, I smiled, rattled the stones in my pocket, and walked toward their alcove.

  Next to her was a shreeliala, the tubes of a bubbler wrapped around its purple-and-green neck over the gill slits, its long, webbed fingers lifted as if it were in midspeech with Avariel though its mouth was closed, and it, too, was looking my way. Its huge eyes blinked once: the transparent underlids sliding sideways, the translucent overlids sliding up from their pouch under the eyes. The shreeliala had the slash of an overseer tattooed on the lilac scales of the crown of its head; beneath it was the emerald dot that said that it was a member of the Council. There was another mark, too: a short, yellow-white bar, bulging slightly at either end: this shreeliala possessed “bones-of-air”—a mutation that caused some shreeliala to have lightweight, air-pocketed bones, which meant it could never sink into the Great Darkness to rest with its own kind, the normal shreeliala with what they call “bones-of-stone.” Instead, this shreeliala would be burned here on the island when it died, in the caldera at the summit of Blackstone—the place the shreeliala call the Pit.

  Avariel watched my approach with a careful almost-smile on her face; the Venusian watched as well, but I knew that attempting to read any human emotion into that face would be a mistake. “Avariel,” I said when I reached their table. “I thought I might find you here.”

  She looked … older. Somehow, I hadn’t expected that. There were severe lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there before, and creases around her neck. Gray had settled in the dark brown hair of her temples. Her arms were covered with white patches of scars, some of them new. But she was still muscular and fit. Still the
athlete, ready to conquer any physical task to which she set herself.

  Her smile flickered. Settled. “Tomio,” she answered flatly. The shreeliala’s huge eyes swiveled in their sockets as it looked from her to me. Bubbles thrashed their way through the clear plastic pipes connecting its gill bubbler to the tank on its back. “I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Really?” I answered, returning her meaningless smile. “After the Green Council’s decision? I thought you’d expect me to come here—if only because I knew you’d be the first one here.”

  “Tomio …” A sigh. Her fingertips tapped an aimless rhythm on the tabletop near her ale. “There’s no going back to what we were. I’m sorry. You really shouldn’t have come here.”

  I raised my hand. “Uh-uh,” I said. “Our relationship isn’t at issue. You know, despite everything, I would have come if you’d asked, if you’d stayed in touch after …” I gestured at the empty space below the stumps of my legs and the floor.

  “Don’t lay that guilt at my door, Tomio,” she said. “I won’t accept it.”

  The shreeliala seemed to hiss, spraying a fine mist of water from its mouth; it adjusted the bubbler. The salty droplets pooled on the varnish of the table; we all looked at it. “The humans know one another?” Heh hoomanths noah won hunover? It had been a long time since I’d heard the shreeliala accent; I had to replay the comment in my head before I understood what it had said, by which time Avariel had already answered.

  “Tomia was here with me the last time, Hasalalo,” she said. “We went down into the Great Darkness together.” The shreeliala nodded. The last time … The water going from green to blue to black. I’d thought it would be easy. I thought we’d just swim down and down until we reached the bottom …

  Avariel’s comment was all that was needed; Hasalalo seemed to know immediately what she referred to, even if for the short-lived shreeliala the events of fifteen Earth years ago were a generation removed. Hasalalo, who looked to be in his prime years, probably hadn’t been alive then, or was just a newly sprouted bud.