Old Venus

by George R. R. Martin

  And there is the house to which my questions guided me: as my informants described; not the greatest but perhaps the meanest; not the foremost but perhaps the most prominent, tucked away in an alley. From its roof flies a flag, and my breath caught: not the Four White Hands of Yoo—never that, but neither the Blue Empress. The smoggy wind tugged at the hand-and-dagger of the Hydes of Grangegorman.

  Swift action: to hesitate would be to falter and fail, to turn and walk away, back down the Valley of the Kilns and the Ten Thousand Steps. I rattle the ceramic chimes. From inside, a huff and sigh. Then a voice: worn ragged, stretched and tired, but unmistakable.

  “Come on in. I’ve been expecting you.”

  V crepitant movebitvolutans: Wescott’s Wandering Star. A wind-mobile vine, native of the Ishtaria altiplano, that grows into a tight spherical web of vines which, in the Venerian Great Day, becomes detached from an atrophied root stock and rolls cross-country, carried on the wind. A central calyx contains woody nuts that produce a pleasant rattling sound as the Wandering Star is in motion.

  Cut paper, painted, layed, and gummed. Perhaps the most intricate of the Venerian papercuts.

  THE SEER’S STORY

  TEA?

  I have it sent up from Camahoo when the stickmen make the return trip. Proper tea. Irish breakfast. It’s very hard to get the water hot enough at this altitude, but it’s my little ritual. I should have asked you to bring some. I’ve known you were looking for me from the moment you set out from Loogaza. You think anyone can wander blithely into Glehenta?

  Tea.

  You look well. The years have been kind to you. I look like shit. Don’t deny it. I know it. I have an excuse. I’m dying, you know. The liquor of the vine—it takes as much as it gives. And this world is hard on humans. The Great Days—you never completely adjust—and the climate: if it’s not the thin air up here, it’s the molds and fungi and spores down there. And the ultraviolet. It dries you out, withers you up. The town healer must have frozen twenty melanomas off me. No, I’m dying. Rotten inside. A leather bag of mush and bones. But you look very well, Ida. So, Patrick shot himself? Fifteen years too late, says I. He could have spared all of us … enough of that. But I’m glad you’re happy. I’m glad you have someone who cares, to treat you the way you should be treated.

  I am the Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, the Earth Man, and I am dying.

  I walked down that same street you walked down. I didn’t ride, I walked, right through the center of town. I didn’t know what to expect. Silence. A mob. Stones. Bullets. To walk right through and out the other side without a door opening to me. I almost did. At the very last house, the door opened and an old man came out and stood in front of me so that I could not pass. “I know you.” He pointed at me. “You came the night of the Javrosts.” I was certain then that I would die, and that seemed not so bad a thing to me. “You were the merciful one, the one who spared our young.” And he went into the house and brought me a porcelain cup of water and I drank it down, and here I remain. The Merciful One.

  They have decided that I am to lead them to glory, or, more likely, to death. It’s justice, I suppose. I have visions you see—pula flashbacks. It works differently on Terrenes than Thents. Oh, they’re hardheaded enough not to believe in divine inspiration or any of that rubbish. They need a figurehead—the repentant mercenary is a good role, and the odd bit of mumbo jumbo from the inside of my addled head doesn’t go amiss.

  Is your tea all right? It’s very hard to get the water hot enough this high. Have I said that before? Ignore me—the flashbacks. Did I tell you I’m dying? But it’s good to see you; oh how long is it?

  And Richard? The children? And Grangegorman? And is Ireland … of course. What I would give for an eyeful of green, for a glimpse of summer sun, a blue sky.

  So, I have been a con man and a lover, a soldier and an addict, and now I end my time as a revolutionary. It is surprisingly easy. The Group of Seven Altiplano Peoples’ Liberation Army do the work: I release gnomic pronouncements that run like grass fire from here to Egayhazy. I did come up with the Blue Empress motif: the Midnight Glory: blooming in the dark, under the breath of the high snows. Apt. They’re not the most poetic of people, these potters. We drove the Duke of Yoo from the Valley of the Kilns and the Ishtar Plain: she is resisted everywhere, but she will not relinquish her claim on the altiplano so lightly. You’ve been in Egayhazy—you’ve seen the forces she’s moving up here. Armies are mustering, and my agents report ’rigibles coming through the passes in the Palisades. An assault will come. The Duke has an alliance with House Shorth—some agreement to divide the altiplano up between them. We’re outnumbered. Outmaneuvered and outsupplied, and we have nowhere to run. They’ll be at each other’s throats within a Great Day, but that’s a matter of damn for us. The Duke may spare the kilns—they’re the source of wealth. Matter of damn to me. I’ll not see it, one way or other. You should leave, Ida. Pula and local wars—never get sucked into them.

  Ah. Unh. Another flashback. They’re getting briefer, but more intense.

  Ida, you are in danger. Leave before night—they’ll attack in the night. I have to stay. The Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, can’t abandon his people. But it was good, so good of you to come. This is a terrible place. I should never have come here. The best traps are the slowest. In you walk, through all the places and all the lives and all the years, never thinking that you are already in the trap, then you go to turn around, and it has closed behind you. Ida, go as soon as you can … go right now. You should never have come. But … oh, how I hate the thought of dying up here on this terrible plain! To see Ireland again …

  V volanti musco: Altiplano Air-moss. The papercut shows part of a symbiotic lighter-than-air creature of the Ishtari altiplano. The plant part consists of curtains of extremely light hanging moss that gather water from the air and low clouds. The animal part is not reproduced.

  Shredded paper, gum.

  He came to the door of his porcelain house, leaning heavily on a stick, a handkerchief pressed to mouth and nose against the volcanic fumes. I had tried to plead with him to leave, but whatever else he has become, he is a Hyde of Grangegorman, and stubborn as an old donkey. There is a wish for death in him; something old and strangling and relentless with the gentlest eyes.

  “I have something for you,” I said, and I gave him the box without ceremony.

  His eyebrows rose when he opened it.

  “Ah.”

  “I stole the Blue Empress.”

  “I know.”

  “I had to keep it out of Patrick’s hands. He would have broken and wasted it, like he broke and wasted everything.” Then my slow mind, so intent on saying this confession right, that I had practiced on the space-crosser, and in every room and every mode of conveyance on my journey across this world, flower to flower, story to story: my middle-aged mind tripped over Arthur’s two words. “You knew?”

  “All along.”

  “You never thought that maybe Richard, maybe Father, or Mammy, or one of the staff had taken it?”

  “I had no doubt that it was you, for those very reasons you said. I chose to keep your secret, and I have.”

  “Arthur, Patrick is dead, Rathangan is mine. You can come home now.”

  “Ah, if it were so easy!”

  “I have a great forgiveness to ask from you, Arthur.”

  “No need. I did it freely. And do you know what, I don’t regret what I did. I was notorious—the Honorable Arthur Hyde, jewel thief and scoundrel. That has currency out in the worlds. It speaks reams that none of the people I used it on asked to see the jewel, or the fortune I presumably had earned from selling it. Not one. Everything I have done, I have done on reputation alone. It’s an achievement. No, I won’t go home, Ida. Don’t ask me to. Don’t raise that phantom before me. Fields of green and soft Kildare mornings. I’m valued here. The people are very kind. I’m accepted. I have virtues. I’m not the minor son of Ir
ish gentry with no land and the arse hanging out of his pants. I am the Merciful One, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl.”

  “Arthur, I want you to have the jewel.”

  He recoiled as if I had offered him a scorpion.

  “I will not have it. I will not touch it. It’s an ill-favored thing. Unlucky. There are no sapphires on this world. You can never touch the Blue Pearl. Take it back to the place it came from.”

  For a moment, I wondered if he was suffering from another one of his hallucinating seizures. His eyes, his voice were firm.

  “You should go, Ida. Leave me. This is my place now. People have tremendous ideas of family—loyalty and undying love and affection: tremendous expectations and ideals that drive them across worlds to confess and receive forgiveness. Families are whatever works. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted me to be. I forgive you—though as I said there is nothing to forgive. There. Does that make us a family now? The Duke of Yoo is coming, Ida. Be away from here before that. Go. The townspeople will help you.”

  And with a wave of his handkerchief, he turned and closed his door to me.

  I wrote that last over a bowl of altiplano mate at the stickmen’s caravanserai in Yelta, the last town in the Valley of the Kilns. I recalled every word, clearly and precisely. Then I had an idea; as clear and precise as my recall of that sad, unresolved conversation with Arthur. I turned to my valise of papers, took out my scissors and a sheet of the deepest indigo and carefully, from memory, began to cut. The stickmen watched curiously, then with wonder. The clean precision of the scissors, so fine and intricate, the difficulty and accuracy of the cut, absorbed me entirely. Doubts fell from me: why had I come to this world? Why had I ventured alone into this noisome valley? Why had Arthur’s casual acceptance of what I had done, the act that shaped both his life and mine, so disappointed me? What had I expected from him? Snip went the scissors, fine curls of indigo paper fell from them onto the table. It had always been the scissors I turned to when the ways of men grew too much. It was a simple cut. I had the heart of it right away, no false starts, no new beginnings. Pure and simple. My onlookers hummed in appreciation. Then I folded the cut into my diary, gathered up my valises, and went out to the waiting spider-car. The eternal clouds seem lower today, like a storm front rolling in. Evening is coming.

  I write quickly, briefly.

  Those are no clouds. Those are the ’rigibles of the Duke of Yoo. The way is shut. Armies are camped across the altiplano. Thousands of soldiers and javrosts. I am trapped here. What am I to do? If I retreat to Glehenta, I will meet the same fate as Arthur and the Valley people—if they even allow me to do that. They might think that I was trying to carry a warning. I might be captured as a spy. I do not want to imagine how the Duke of Yoo treats spies. I do not imagine my Terrene identity will protect me. And the sister of the Seer, the Blue Empress! Do I hide in Yelta and hope that they will pass me by? But how could I live with myself knowing that I had abandoned Arthur?

  There is no way forward, no way back, no way around.

  I am an aristocrat. A minor one, but of stock. I understand the rules of class, and breeding. The Duke is vastly more powerful than I, but we are of a class. I can speak with her, gentry to gentry. We can communicate as equals.

  I must persuade her to call off the attack.

  Impossible! A middle-aged Irish widow, armed only with a pair of scissors. What can she do? Kill an army with gum and tissue? The death of a thousand papercuts?

  Perhaps I could buy her off. A prize beyond prize: a jewel from the stars, from their goddess itself. Arthur said that sapphires are unknown on this world. A stone beyond compare.

  I am writing as fast as I am thinking now.

  I must go and face the Duke of Yoo, female to female. I am of Ireland, a citizen of no mean nation. We confront the powerful, we defeat empires. I will go to her and name myself and I shall offer her the Blue Empress. The true Blue Empress. Beyond that, I cannot say. But I must do it and do it now.

  I cannot make the driver of my spider-car take me into the camp of the enemy. I have asked her to leave me and make her own way back to Yelta. I am writing this with a stub of pencil. I am alone on the high altiplano. Above the shield wall, the cloud layer is breaking up. Enormous shafts of dazzling light spread across the high plain. Two mounted figures have broken from the line and ride toward me. I am afraid—and yet I am calm. I take the Blue Empress from its box and grasp it tight in my gloved hand. Hard to write now. No more diary. They are here.

  V. Gloria medianocte: the Midnight Glory, or Blue Empress.

  Card, paper, ink.

  For Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger,

  who would love to paint the wallowing

  dinosaurs of swampy Venus

  Story Copyrights

  “Introduction: Return to Venusport,” by Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 2015 by Gardner Dozois.

  “Frogheads,” by Allen M. Steele. Copyright © 2015 by Allen M. Steele.

  “The Drowned Celestial,” by Lavie Tidhar. Copyright © 2015 by Lavie Tidhar.

  “Planet of Fear,” by Paul McAuley. Copyright © 2015 by Paul McAuley.

  “Greeves and the Evening Star,” by Matthew Hughes. Copyright © 2015 by Matthew Hughes.

  “A Planet Called Desire,” by Gwyneth Jones. Copyright © 2015 by Gwyneth Jones.

  “Living Hell,” by Joe Haldeman. Copyright © 2015 by Joe Haldeman.

  “Bones of Air, Bones of Stone,” by Stephen Leigh. Copyright © 2015 by Stephen Leigh.

  “Ruins,” by Eleanor Arnason. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Arnason.

  “The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss,” by David Brin. Copyright © 2015 by David Brin.

  “By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers,” by Garth Nix. Copyright © 2015 by Garth Nix.

  “The Sunset of Time,” by Michael Cassutt. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Cassutt.

  “Pale Blue Memories,” by Tobias S. Buckell. Copyright © 2015 by Tobias S. Buckell.

  “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” by Elizabeth Bear. Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Wishnevsky.

  “The Wizard of the Trees,” by Joe R. Lansdale. Copyright © 2015 by Joe R. Lansdale.

  “The Godstone of Venus,” by Mike Resnick. Copyright © 2015 by Kirinyaga Inc.

  “Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan,” by Ian McDonald. Copyright © 2015 by Ian McDonald.

  By George R. R. Martin

  A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

  Book One: A Game of Thrones

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  Book Three: A Storm of Swords

  Book Four: A Feast for Crows

  Book Five: A Dance with Dragons

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  A Song for Lya and Other Stories

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  Songs the Dead Men Sing

  Nightflyers

  Tuf Voyaging

  Portraits of His Children

  Quartet

  EDITED BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

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  Night Visions 3

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  CO-EDITED WITH GARDNER DOZOIS

  Warriors I–III

  Songs of the Dying Earth

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  Down These Strange Streets

  Old Mars

  Dangerous Women

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  About the Editors

  George R. R. Martin is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including the acclaimed series A Song of Ice and Fire—A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons. As a writer-producer, he has worked on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and pilots that were never made. He lives with the lovely Parris in Santa Fe, New Mexico.