Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

The moment the sun leaked through the clouds, Venusians beat us awake to head out to the fields where the large, silvered airships came to rest. And all day long we’d unload what the city of Kish needed to consume, and a lot of what its lords desired to spend their vast wealth on.

  “Where do these goods come from?” I asked the Venusian with the scarred arms.

  The first time I asked, she ignored me. But as we stood and waited for another airship to arrive and drank from waterskins, she spoke to me.

  “Other cities, larger cities,” she said, pointing off toward the ocean. “The lords of Kish cannot do without the spices and foods from their mother cities. And Kish is not big enough to grow its own.”

  “And Kish trades rifles and machines for minerals, ores, and work,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  The next airship we loaded with scared Venusian hill-tribe folk, possibly even some of the same ones who’d first captured us, now captured by some other group with laser rifles. We shoved and beat them aboard and tried not to meet their pleading eyes.

  One late night, she came to my blanket.

  “My name is Maet of Tannish,” she told me.

  “I’m Charles Stewart,” I said.

  “Where is Stewart?” she asked.

  “Nowhere. It doesn’t matter. I’m Charles of Earth. And Earth is beyond the clouds.”

  “There is nothing but void beyond the clouds,” Maet told me with a pitying chuckle. “All that is important lies beneath the veil. There must be a reason we can’t see beyond it, and that is most likely because there is nothing worth seeing.”

  I opened my mouth to argue with this, then realized that Maet was my only companion, and I was too tired to argue. I’d thought the weeks of training to be a spaceman intense.

  I had no idea.

  I’d had energy and verve my first few days. But as weeks became months, my back felt like it’d been set on fire by the constant bending. My fire to understand and study the world around me dampened every day. There were no weekends. No labor laws to limit being rushed out in the middle of the night to grab the ropes of an incoming airship, then unload it once it was tethered. No time to recoup. Just a slow, steady erosion.

  Maet just lay next to me, and that was enough that first night, to feel someone breathing next to me.

  I struggled to glean information about where Kish lay from her and what was out beyond its borders. The free lands of wild peoples. Hill tribes. What trails led where? I wanted to make a map of the world in my head before I made any decisions. I needed to find out how best to make my way in this world, and to understand its rules, no matter how horrific.

  And I’d always had to play the game of their rules and my hidden face. I remembered my grandfather telling me once, “Never show anyone what you’re really thinking, because then they might know what you’re going to do.” Even Maet, as we continued to huddle in our corner of the common house, didn’t know what I thought about.

  As Maet and I grew together, I saw Heston had started to talk to other Venusians. In the courtyard behind a tree. Near the corner of the common house.

  I wasn’t surprised when he crawled over to my blanket as I lay sweating in the tropical heat and humidity while Maet was off talking to someone else.

  “Soldier, we may have our differences,” he hissed to me, “but now it’s going to be time to fight together.”

  “You’re planning a revolt,” I said, looking over at his crouched form. It was a shadow against a shadow in the city light that came in through the barred windows at the top of the walls.

  I couldn’t see surprise on his silhouetted face, but I could hear it in his voice. “Yes. There are others who want their freedom. I’ve been talking to them. Will you join us?”

  Ever since I saw him whispering to others, I’d thought about it. And about what I would say. “You ever read much about slave history?” I asked. “Probably not, it’s not a field many people study. But let me tell you something: all of the slave revolts except the one on Haiti were put down. And we’re not on an island that we could defend. Even in South America, where they had great numbers, they still remained under colonial rule for many long ages.”

  “None of them had a US Marine in charge,” Heston hissed.

  “You think none of them had any war experience?” I asked calmly. He didn’t know their names, or positions, because they’d been wiped out. But many early slaves had been captured in war. My own family held at least two tribal leaders, according to legend. One of them had committed suicide after three years of being forced to work a sugar plantation.

  “They need the right kind of leader,” Heston said.

  I put a hand out to him. “I wish you luck.”

  Heston hissed. No doubt disgusted with me and thinking me a coward, he ignored my hand and left as he saw Maet’s silhouette coming toward us.

  Was I a coward? I could hardly sleep that night, bile in the back of my mouth.

  In the early gray light of dawn, I woke to Heston’s screams. I remembered the sound of a cat that had been caught by a hunting dog one of my neighbors had penned up when I was a kid, and it was something like that. A high-pitched mewling that didn’t stop, it snapped me out of my dreams about blue skies and no clouds.

  Heston was in the courtyard, his hands and feet bound to a pole set into a notched hole in one of the flagstones.

  Venusians didn’t use whips. They hung pink-and-snow-feathered leeches from Heston’s chest and back. As I got close I could hear a loud sucking crunch, and Heston screamed again.

  When the creature was finished, one of the overseers pulled it away, leaving a deep and ragged hole that streamed blood and black ichor. It smelled of licorice and rot.

  Venusians streamed past, darting sidelong glances as I moved to stand in front of Heston. He looked up at me through a haze of pain. “Charles …”

  “Who betrayed you?” I asked sadly.

  Heston coughed. “Thought it was you, at first. But it was a Venusian. Telkket. From one of the southern marshes. He stood here and announced to everyone what I’d done. Why? Why would someone do that?”

  “The same reason it’s always been done,” I said, fiddling with my bracelet. “Even if your uprising had succeeded, most of our fellow workers in the common house stood a chance of dying from the repercussions. A slaver society reacts strongly to uprisings, they’d know that. By ratting you out, he’s guaranteed a small improvement in his life. Most people go for the bird in the hand.”

  Heston began to cry. “They’re going to drag this out. They’re going to kill me.”

  “Or not,” I said. “A living, crippled and broken slave is a good example to have as well.”

  “Oh God.” That last was a faint whimper.

  I thought for a long second, then continued. “You probably suspected this, given the things I’ve said. But some of my ancestors were slaves. My great-grandfather, he fought. Like you. Was whipped. Hobbled. Scarred by brands. But one day, after fighting so long, he up and cut his own throat rather than continue living under the whip. Not something I figured you’d appreciate before this morning, but something I’ve been thinking on ever since we were captured.”

  Heston looked up at me with lost eyes.

  I cracked my wristband and removed the cyanide pill inside. “I know you didn’t have time to use yours,” I said. “Maybe they won’t kill you. Maybe they’ll keep hurting you. I don’t know. But I want to give you this. Just in case.”

  I placed the pill on his tongue, like a priest giving someone a Communion wafer.

  “Thank you,” he hissed.

  One of the overseers struck me, yelling at me to move on. I left as they were putting the leeches back on. This time they ate at his ankles, and Heston sagged at the pole as his feet failed.

  By sunset he was dead, mouth foaming from the cyanide pill.

  5.

  “I’M PREGNANT,” MAET TOLD ME ONE MORNING AS WE LINED UP for the fields.

  The look on my face un
nerved her. She squeezed my hand. “Don’t be so sad, Charles of Earth.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “Didn’t know what?” Maet asked.

  “That we could even have a child.” She was Venusian. But we all were humanoid, as Eric had noted in our first days trapped together. He had talked about common evolution, or panspermia. Or even more fanciful reasons why the human form existed here.

  And then the real horror of it all struck me. “What life will my child grow into?” I asked. I thought about myself at four, free and playing in the grass, ignoring my mother’s call to come inside. I tried to imagine bringing my own child along to the fields to unload the ships. Seeing my child whipped and broken.

  “There are many here who are generations old,” Maet said. “We will adapt. All adapt.” But there was a note of sadness and resignation in her voice.

  I could hardly see the ground in front of me for days.

  My world revolved around the stone street out to the field where the airships landed. I could count the stones on the walk to and from the common house with my eyes closed, half-asleep in the early morning shamble out, and the tired shuffle back to what I’d come to regard as home.

  My dreams, when I was rested enough to dream now, turned from trying to remember what blue skies looked like to dreaming of flying. It took me a long while to understand what my subconscious mind had decided, as I had slipped into a dark place while thinking about bringing a child into this world.

  But one day, watching the silvered airship approach and drop its single bowline, I knew how I would leave: I wouldn’t run, I would fly.

  I’d been walking in and out of the cabins of these ships for so long. I knew the layout, and although I couldn’t read Venusian, I had some sense of the controls. I had been a pilot in the war, after all.

  The Venusian airship designs were better than the old Nazi ones we’d seen in newsreels. The Venusians compressed the helium inside into tanks, letting the airships glide down onto the ground and unload cargo without shooting up into the air. The bowline was a formality, probably a holdover from when they’d been more like the airships on Earth and always lighter than air.

  It took just a few minutes to pump the helium back into the airship’s envelope. That, I thought, would be the trickiest segment of my plan.

  But I wouldn’t be able to fly it alone.

  The longest stretch of work came as I worked to convince the overseers to bring Shepard and Eric over to our estate, promising them that the three of us would work harder despite the nightly beatings we would surely suffer for rising above the pack.

  That took working extra hard. To get noticed by the overseers so I could sell them on the idea. And that meant barely sleeping in a corner with a small piece of metal I’d rubbed into a sharp blade against a stone edge to protect Maet, my unborn child, and myself.

  When the lord approved the purchase, and the overseers shoved a very thin Eric into the common room, I barely recognized him. Emaciated, his hair unkempt, he collapsed by my blanket and slept.

  “It was hellish,” Shepard told me as I kept watch with my blade. “They were working us to death building a seawall for real ships. Knee deep in the water, moving rocks however we could. Bit by bit. I kept telling them I was an engineer. We could do better with machines, and they beat me every time. I learned to shut up pretty quick.”

  “It is better here,” I told him. And Shepard began to weep silently and thank me for getting them moved. They were not surprised by Maet, or to find that she was pregnant. Eric shrugged, and wasn’t even fascinated by the fact.

  How quickly our priorities could change! From heroes of a nation to weeping about being moved to a less servile state.

  I told them about Commander James, and Shepard nodded. “They took our bracelets away and sold them as trinkets to the children. Sometimes I would lie awake hoping one of them ate the pill, and other times I hated myself for thinking it.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Now get some sleep.”

  I watched over them that first night in the dark like a feral mother cat, until Shepard woke up and spelled me. In the days that followed, we set watch each night and got enough sleep to survive.

  I waited for Eric to get his strength back before I began whispering my own plan to them. They blanched at first, thinking about Commander James’s fate. “This is not a revolt, this is running off into the bush. There were a lot of people who managed it and built lives for themselves.” I thought of the runaways who had lived in the mountains of Jamaica that my father would tell tall tales about.

  “When do we make a run for it?” Shepard asked.

  “When we’re done unloading, and everyone is going back. We cut the moorings and leap aboard. We’ll only ever have one chance. And we’ll have to make sure there aren’t armed Venusians aboard. I won’t know the best moment to do this ahead of time, but if I call for you, do not hesitate.”

  The Venusians at my estate let us keep possessions, though the overseers ransacked through them on random occasions. I’d been storing cured meats that we’d been given and a kind of hard bread. A few water sacks hid the stuff that could get us in trouble.

  Food, water, a handmade metal knife, some needles and thread that Maet kept hidden for herself, so she could mend her rough-spun clothes: this was everything we owned.

  I hadn’t told her what we planned though I began to suspect she knew.

  We would head for the northern swamps, near the foothills we’d crashed at. Hike over the nearest pass we could find, and if we made it, off into areas few in Kish cared to visit on the other side.

  And, then, maybe, we could figure out what to do. Eric spoke of rescue and scanning the skies. I thought about hacking a small farm out of the wilderness. Shepard knew how to build traps.

  Even if we died, we reasoned, we would die once again free.

  We just needed the right airship, and a little bit more food to hide in our water sacks, and we could make the run.

  The Nazis, though, destroyed our careful plans by arriving one uncharacteristically chilly morning.

  The three Nazis had been captured ten days ago, the overseers told us, on an island to the west. They still wore muddied, but tattered German uniforms with Nazi insignia on the shoulders. “You should be excited to have more of your tribe here to work alongside you,” the proud overseer who had arranged the sale explained, and pointed at Eric and Shepard. “Just like these two.”

  “But they aren’t like us,” I explained. “They’re from a different country, one we’re at war with.”

  “War?” the overseer talking to me found that curious. “Well, there is no war for you here. Just more like you. You’re the same. So you will work the same.”

  Left alone, we all eyed one another warily. I realized that Eric and Shepard looked to me for a decision.

  I wanted to kill them, for blowing us out of the sky with a missile, but I knew that would only draw attention to us.

  The Nazis took the first move, though, introducing themselves nervously. Their commandant, Hans, spoke in lightly accented English. “They captured us when we landed. We thought we were going to be the first Germans to liaise with their civilization, but instead they destroyed our rocket ship and captured us. They refused to believe we came from above the clouds and they put us and all our stuff in cages. They took us around by aircraft to manors and showed us off to royals and important people.”

  “Like animals,” another Nazi, Yost, spit. “They put collars on us and chained us.”

  “We escaped, once, but they hunted us back down. We killed a few of them,” Hans said, satisfied with himself.

  “So they sold us off. We were too much trouble.”

  I stood impassively for a while, then held out changes of clothes. Rough-spun fabric, just like the gray clothes we wore. “Well, it won’t be nice like that anymore,” I said. “Now you will be working.”

  “That will give us more time to plan,” Hans said.

/>   “To do what?” I asked.

  “Gather what tools we can to fight,” the commandant said.

  “It’s been tried,” I told him.

  “What these creatures need is the right kind of leader. A decorated fighter, a strong strategist. I commanded a panzer squadron in Egypt,” Hans said, his chest sticking out.

  “Get dressed,” I told him. “If you take any longer, the overseers will come at us.”

  As the Nazis changed clothes, Eric whispered, “Are we going to let them join us?”

  I shook my head.

  “But they’re humans,” he said. “The only other ones. Surely we have an obligation …”

  “We were shot out of the sky by a Nazi missile, Eric,” I whispered back. “What makes you think they won’t try to kill us again? Are you willing to bet everything on that?”

  The Nazis would not speak around Maet and viewed her with suspicion. So I kept her close as we worked their first day.

  “Will you run with me?” I asked her.

  She showed me her scarred arms. “I was free once. They bound me to the pole and scarred my arms to teach me my lesson. But I would be free again, yes.”

  I would have hugged her there, but there was work to be done. That night I snuck my blade between Hans’s blankets as he slept. Afterward we tiptoed over to a new place in the common house.

  Before the Nazis woke up I found an overseer. The Nazis were enemy combatants, I told myself. Men who would see people like my grandparents eliminated from the world. That was what I had believed when I joined the army.

  Yet, on some dark nights, I’d wondered. After all, what were the Nazis but the ultimate end point of European colonialism? Nazis were even white people who had told other white people they weren’t white enough. They were white people who had invaded and colonized other white countries to spread their concept of a master race. Much like those invaded Europeans had once colonized other countries and told the brown people there that they were the master race. Was what the Nazis did to Europe different than what Belgians did to the Congo?

  My family had experienced things close to Nazi beliefs on our own home front. Enough that I could shiver and wonder what the point of the fighting was, in darker moments.