Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  He didn’t get to finish his thinking, because the four Venusians charged us. The heavy-footed beasts thundered as their long necks slinked forward with more eager hisses.

  I grabbed Eric’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet and we ran, but within seconds the thud of saurian beasts filled our world and nets with heavy weights slapped into our backs.

  We fell to the ground, entangled and struggling to get our machetes out to chop at the netting. I managed first, sawing through and scrambling up. Eric followed.

  He raised his machete, and a bright flash of light cracked out from one of the rifles. Eric screamed and dropped his blade, then raised his hands warily. “You’d better drop yours too,” he said.

  I let it fall to the ground.

  The Venusians regarded us with large eyes and dark pupils, then dropped to the ground with loops of rope.

  Within a minute, we were tied behind the beasts and being pulled along down the trail, through the jungle.

  “I don’t understand,” Eric said, in shock. “We are visitors from another world. They must have seen the rocket ship. We must look alien to them. This is a First Contact situation, what are they doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and gasped as the rope yanked at me.

  They pulled us into what looked like a village, with huts made out of long poles and woven with fronds. Wary Venusians sat around cooking pots. They began to shout and point at us with large smiles, while the Venusians who captured us responded with similar whoops.

  “We. Come. In. Peace,” Eric declared, but was rewarded with a strike to the head for his efforts. I grabbed him as he staggered and helped him stand as we were shoved into a set of cages at the center of the village.

  I should have spent the next couple of hours paying attention and learning what I could about the Venusians, but instead I did my best to make Eric comfortable and keep him from falling asleep.

  A blow to the head was never a good thing.

  As a result, I almost didn’t notice another party of Venusians returning in triumph with the rest of our crew. Cmdr. Heston James, shoved forward by gunpoint, Shepard by his side, both of them holding Tad up by an arm and looking exhausted, bruised, and shocked.

  Inside the cage with us, Heston took a look at Eric briefly. “He should be okay,” he said in a grim voice. “But Tad’s in worse shape. He fought back. All the way. They shot him.”

  There was a burned hole in Tad’s stomach. It was blackened with cauterization, but we all had enough medical training for the trip to know that it was fatal.

  “Charles, you’re the languages and communications expert, any read on these Venusians?” Heston asked.

  I shook my head. I was the languages guy, which meant that I’d studied seven or so before the war while I was in college. The half-completed linguistics degree had helped edge me into the communications spot on the crew. “It’s another planet. Another species. And I’ve been watching after Eric.”

  “Fucking savages,” Heston spit. “Animal-riding, hut-living savages.”

  I said nothing.

  Tad died a few hours later, gurgling out his last breath with a whimper of pain. Eventually, we all tried to get some sleep as the ambient, cloud-filtered sunlight faded away.

  We woke early the next morning to Shepard’s shouting at several tiny Venusians who were poking him with a sharp stick.

  Eric was looking around, dazed and awake, thank goodness. His only comment on the situation was a bemused observation. “I think the superpale skin they have is an adaption,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Not much sunlight gets to the surface of Venus. If you look at people on Earth, it’s the same. The farther north, the less sun, the paler they get.”

  3.

  WE WERE TAKEN DOWN OFF THE PLATEAU THE NEXT MORNING on a two-day-long, jolting cart ride to a fortress that looked like a giant sea urchin with black, spiked rock spurs radiating in all directions.

  Under one of the spurs, the Venusians argued for fifteen minutes with another set of Venusians wearing fancy red silks.

  Then more Venusians came out with a crate full of rifles.

  “I think we just got traded for rifles,” Shepard said. “Jesus Christ.”

  The hill Venusians turned and left us standing in front of the spiked fortress, heading back to their swampy home.

  “They won’t know we came from the sky,” Eric said, his voice quavering slightly.

  “Then we learn the local lingo,” Commander James said quietly. “However long it takes us. And we tell them. They can see, with their own eyes, that we look different.”

  “For all they know,” I said, speaking for the first time that morning, “we’re strange Venusians from some unknown location on their planet.”

  “Stow that talk,” Heston ordered.

  —–—

  The next week of travel blurred. More carts. Baggage trains. Often we were forced to walk along them, our hands bound, pale Venusians shouting at us. Shepard and Eric had been keeping shifts tracking our turns and directions, trying to keep an internal map of how to get back to our ship.

  The humid air stopped feeling so strange in the second week of walking. The feathery fronds of the vegetation began to stop looking so strange. Though every time something rustled from deep inside the vegetation, I still felt nervous.

  We arrived at a coast in the second week. A great walled city sat half in the emerald forest and half projected out into the gray ocean. Docks stuck out like fingers from a hand, and a crude seawall protected it all from the ocean swells.

  Rock houses leaned this way and that inside the walls. Warehouses painted in pastel shades leaked strange scents none of us could recognize. Was that cinnamon? With a bacony sort of vanilla?

  We’d been fed Venusian food. A tasteless, pasty stew that caused me to spend the first night in agony with stomach cramps but that I’d adapted to in the days of walking. But smelling the scents, I realized we’d been given their equivalent of gruel.

  We followed our captors down streets no more than four or five people wide, then into a central market. It was filled with Venusians selling flanks of meat, what looked like misshapen vegetables in unappealing colors, and the spices that we’d smelled passing the warehouses.

  A short Venusian with scars advanced on us with a knife. We recoiled, but he used it quickly to cut our clothes away.

  “Damn it!” Heston screamed, uselessly, as he stood in the air naked as the day he was born, his naturally ramrod straight back suddenly curved as he tried to cover himself.

  Venusians threw buckets of water on us to clean the road dirt away and scrubbed us clean.

  And we were marched over to a stone dais.

  My stomach clenched as I stood there and watched Venusians cluster around to stare at us.

  “We’re visitors!” Shepard shouted at them. “Visitors from another world! Don’t you understand? You should be giving us a parade!”

  “Shep,” Eric said quietly, and looked at me. “I think Charles is right. They’ve never seen outside the clouds. They might not know about other planets, stars. They probably think we’re just strange-looking Venusians.”

  “But we came in a rocket ship!” Shepard protested.

  “Is that anything like an airship?” Eric asked, and pointed over our heads.

  We looked up. A massive lighter-than-air machine glided in over the ocean toward the city, slowly beginning to drop out of the air toward a large field.

  “The Venusians that captured us might not even know much about such things,” Eric said. “They didn’t know how to make guns, and live in the hills. They sold us for the guns. They might not have even explained to these guys how we showed up.”

  He was right. And I was right.

  And I knew how right I was when it began. It might have been in an alien tongue, but I knew the patter for what it was.

  An auction.

  I began to weep silently to myself, suddenly alone and cold in the humid tropical air of Venus,
rescue millions of miles away.

  Heston snapped at me. “Get ahold of yourself, Charles. We’re going to figure a way out of this.”

  “Really?” I stared at him. “It took hundreds of years back home for people to figure a way out. And even then, they still live as secondclass citizens. Even if we do communicate with them, judging by all this, we may end up being little more than scientific curiosities.”

  The crew stared at me like I’d grown a second head.

  But we didn’t have much time to debate further. We were ripped apart, the auction done. Heston and I were taken to a mansion with a vast cobblestoned courtyard on the edge of the city’s walls. Men in silks and headdresses covered with snakelike patterns of gold led the way, while short, scruffy Venusians poked and prodded us along.

  Then they swarmed us, grabbing us by legs and arms and holding us down to the wet stones as we struggled and fought the sudden immobilization.

  One of the silk-wearing Venusians kneeled next to us. He held a tiny slug in the grip of some tongs.

  “What are you doing?” Heston shouted. “I demand …”

  The Venusian shoved the slug into Heston’s nose. For a moment, both slug and man lay still, somewhat stunned.

  Then it began wriggling. All the way up into his nose.

  Heston screamed.

  The Venusian was handed another set of tongs, and turned for me. And I screamed and struggled to no avail.

  It slithered into my nose, a slimy wetness moving upward. Mucus dripped down my lip, and my nasal cavity screamed as it was filled with a pushing, tearing sensation. I tasted blood as it dripped down the back of my throat and I gagged.

  The Venusians closed great stone doors at the entrance. Some bored guards with rifles patrolled an elevated walkway and looked down at us. But we were left alone on the courtyard’s stones to stare up at the clouds as our foreheads ached.

  Dark, gray clouds. Always.

  I’d never see a blue sky again, I realized, before I slipped into fever dreams. We vomited bile, bled through our noses, and curled into balls on the stones. Occasionally Venusians would come and yell at us. “Get up! Do you understand us yet?”

  It wasn’t until later in the day that I realized something. “Heston! Heston, I think I understand them!”

  Heston groaned. “I thought it was you yelling insults at me, but I don’t think you’d call me a Kafftig, whatever that is.”

  I could imagine Eric’s telling us that our nasal cavities were the closest entrance in the body to our brains, and this slug would have crawled up there to …

  I staggered up. “I can stand,” I said. “Can you understand me?”

  “Get up!” a Venusian demanded. “If you can understand me, get up!”

  Heston held on to my shoulder. He was excited. “We’re visitors! We’re from another world.” He pointed up at the dark, gray clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon. “We’re from beyond the clouds.”

  The Venusians around us laughed. A yipping, barking sound. “There is nowhere else but the surface, and there is nothing beyond the clouds but more clouds and emptiness.”

  Heston wouldn’t let it go. He kept arguing. And eventually his shouts led to warnings, then the Venusians clubbed him until he shut up. They forced me to carry him, dazed, across the courtyard and into a small, cramped common house.

  It was dark, and damp, and the floor covered in straw. We huddled in the corner away from other Venusians who growled at us as the door was locked shut for the night.

  The next morning we were all led out to the landing fields of the city, where the airships slowly eased in over the ocean and came to a rest. Under the eye of two armed Venusians, we unloaded the airship’s wares. Packages of foods, jars filled with oils and spices. The sort of cargo that empires sent to far-flung cities at the periphery.

  “I don’t understand,” Heston said. “They have technology. We’re unloading airships. They have laser rifles. Why forced labor? This makes no sense. Maybe they don’t have capitalism or democracy here. Maybe we’ll have to bring it to them! Because I tell you what, a few good, red-blooded, American longshoremen would get this ship unloaded faster than any of these other poor creatures.”

  I must have snorted because Heston stared at me. “Capitalism and democracy included slavery until late last century, Commander. That was the American way until the Civil War. As far as I can tell, visiting the cotton fields, it is still the natural friend of slavery. You have family in West Virginia digging coal, right? Any of them in debt for life to the company store, being charged company rent for their home and company credit for their groceries? If you can force someone to work for free, isn’t that the most profit ever? If all that matters to you is profit, then it’s a natural endpoint.”

  Heston stopped working and glared at me. “Are you a communist?”

  I had a retort, but one of the overseers waded in with a club. Heston stood up and shouted back at him but earned several smacks to the head.

  By now I was surprised he could even think.

  “Work!” we were ordered. “This is not the time for talking. Keep talking and we’ll sear your skin off.”

  We got back to lugging stuff off the ship to the waiting carts with their six-legged beasts patiently holding steady in their harnesses.

  “If we can just talk to the right people,” Heston whispered, as we walked back. “We need to find a politician or a scientist. We need to talk to their leaders, not workers and overseers. Talk to just the right person in power, it will be okay.”

  The commander believed that. He believed that because for him it had always been true. His life had ups and downs, but for true injustices, he’d always been able to find the right person and set things right.

  There was order and justice. He truly believed in those things. The world worked a certain way for him.

  “If we get this over, and see if we can petition a judge, or someone, we might be able to talk to the right people.”

  Heston worked faster and faster, his mind set on the goal of getting the airship unloaded. I struggled to keep up with his newfound energy. The commander had a destination in mind, and now he had set himself to it.

  “Commander,” I whispered. “Slow down.”

  He blinked. “Why?”

  “The other Venusians aren’t working as fast. Think about it. They’re slaves. There’s no reason to kill themselves working harder, they’re not getting paid. The only way for them to make this bearable is to work just fast enough to not be abused, see?”

  “Their laziness isn’t my problem,” Heston growled.

  That night the entire common house of Venusians beat us with balled fists. Heston gave as good as he could for the first ten minutes, but there were just too many of them.

  The next day, we could barely keep up, our bruises and torn muscles were in so much agony we gasped as we worked and said nothing to one another.

  “Welcome,” one of the other Venusians had said after he broke my ring finger beneath his blue-veined heel. “To the city of Kish.”

  4.

  COMMANDER JAMES GOT HIS CHANCE TO TALK TO THE RIGHT Venusian after a long, backbreaking week of labor. Before the sun faded away, the Venusians would let us relax in the purple grasses inside the walls.

  I had settled near a reflecting pool, dipping my aching feet in it, when a retinue of colorfully dressed Venusians swept through the courtyard. In the center was the lord of the house, who we had come to learn from overhead chatter was a customs official for the city of Kish.

  Heston threw himself into the Venusian’s path. “My lord of the estate!” he shouted as Venusians turned in shock and horror. One of the overseers loitering around the edge of the courtyard raised a rifle, but the lord raised his hand to stop the killing shot.

  I realized that Heston had faltered, as he didn’t know the lord’s name. He was only referred to as “the lord.” A pronoun, the pronoun. The only one that mattered within these walls.

  Hesto
n stumbled forward. “My lord, I am a rocket man from above the clouds …”

  That was as far as he got. The lord shook his head impatiently and gestured, and Commander James was hauled away. He might have been stronger than the slender Venusians, but there were more of them.

  “Was he one of the new exotics?” the lord asked, and looked over at where I still sat.

  “Yes, my lord,” one of the overseers said, rushing to bow. “They work hard.”

  “Good. Worth the metal price. But do cut off their tongues if they ever dare babble at me again.”

  And in a flourish of silks and nutmeglike perfume, the retinue left for the sound of music and laughter somewhere deep in Kish.

  “He is lucky they didn’t take his tongue out as a first punishment,” said a Venusian nearby. She sported knife scars up and down her arms, and I could tell she came from the northern hills by her cadence and the punctures in the webs of her hands, where she’d once worn gold rings.

  “He’s stubborn,” I told her. “I bet he will lose it before we are done here.”

  I tended to a dazed Heston after his beating, trying to get him to drink water. I was trying to get him oriented because he was floundering. “You know free economies are rare, Commander. Even on Earth. It’s not surprising, really. If aliens were to land on Earth and look vaguely like us, it might not have been good for them either, being different. Imagine if aliens had landed in the South, before the Civil War that we had to fight so bloodily to get rid of this stain …”

  Through bruised lips and swollen eyes, Commander James said, firmly, “The War of Northern Aggression was fought over states’ rights.”

  And with a grunt of pain, he picked up his blanket, his dog tags that he’d been allowed to keep, and dragged himself over to the other side of the common house.

  —–—

  I became an alien on another world, with the only other person I knew refusing to speak to me. I was annoyed at first, working out arguments in my head that I would have with the commander when we next spoke. But the work ate into me.