Old Venus Read online

  “Something you could show the captain,” Arkadi said.

  He was a quick study.

  “It could be a bacterium,” Katya said. “Or a virus. Viruses are generally not much bigger than the wavelength of visible light, so hard to see with a conventional microscope like this. I’ll find out exactly what it is when I get the samples to a fully equipped lab, but it has to be something native. Something that affects the behavior of its host. It made the fish beach themselves. It made the miners hallucinate. Made them believe that they were being attacked. Made some of them kill themselves. Made some of them kill their friends. I think the rest ran off into the countryside.”

  “But you can’t prove it.”

  “Not here. Not yet. Unless Captain Chernov has found the missing men.”

  He hadn’t. His search party had scoured the strip mine from one end to the other and returned to the station with two bodies they had found at the base of a vertical rock face, but there was no sign of the rest—six by Katya’s count. Captain Chernov was convinced that they had been captured or killed by raiders, but listened to Katya’s précis of Georgi Zhzhyonov’s notes and watched the video.

  At the end, he said, “The pigs became sick, the men became sick. And you want to link them with this—what did you call it?”

  “A zoonosis,” Katya said.

  “But you have no proof.”

  “There is the timing. The men started to become sick a week after the fish washed up. If they fed some of the fish to the pigs, it’s long enough for an infection to develop.”

  “The man on the crane, was he coughing? No: he was crazy. And the dead men we found—they died from their own hand, or from bullets. Not some parasite.”

  “Men and pigs are similar but not identical—”

  “The pigs might have caught some illness. Maybe from the fish, why not? But what happened to the men is different. It is clear that their minds were affected.”

  “On Earth, there are many examples of parasites that alter the behavior of their hosts,” Katya said.

  “We are not on Earth,” Captain Chernov said. “And this is nothing to do with parasites. The men were driven mad, that is clear. But by what? I think it could very well be the result of the testing of some kind of psychological-war weapon. A poison gas, perhaps. A gas that does not kill but alters the mind. The Americans deployed it here, in this remote place, observed the results, then captured the survivors. And now they return, pretending to help, but really wanting to capture us, in case we have discovered evidence of what they did. And your talk of a disease could help them, Doctor. Have you thought of that? Suppose the Americans claim that this was due to a native disease that infects people? Suppose they present false evidence to back up their story? We would have to quarantine this station and perhaps evacuate the others. Leave the coast open for the Americans to claim. Well, we will not run. We will defend this place. We will engage the enemy. We will uncover the truth about the atrocity they committed here. Do that for me, Doctor. Find the truth. Not fairy tales.”

  He would not look at the map, would not listen to Katya’s idea about where the last of the miners could be hiding. He had worked up a story that satisfied his prejudices, and he was not going to change his mind. The enemy had done this; they were returning to the scene of the crime; they must be punished.

  The chief petty officer and two seamen were left to guard the station; everyone else went back to the ekranoplan. Katya wasn’t confined to her cabin, but the hatches to the observation deck and the wings were locked down, and Captain Chernov made it clear that the bridges were off-limits. She spent a little time writing up a report, trying to keep it as dispassionate as possible. She wasn’t sure if anyone would read it, but she had to put down the facts and her own conclusions.

  Overhead, something rumbled and whined. She wondered if it was something to do with the missile launch tubes mounted on the top of the ekranoplan.

  When she was finished, she couldn’t stay in her cabin. The ekranoplan was full of restless activity. Men clattering up and down ladders, along companionways. Loud voices. A general excitement. Three seamen cleaning carbines in the mess hall ignored Katya as she pottered in the galley, ignored her when she left, carrying two mugs of tea.

  She found Arkadi Sarantsev in the fire-control bay, handed him one of the mugs. He told her that Captain Chernov had reported to Central Command in Kosmograd, and they had taken him seriously. A three-hundred-kilometer exclusion zone had been declared along the coast, and all American and British vessels had been ordered to leave it. The Americans had lodged a formal protest and were sending two frigates to back up their research vessel, which had turned around fifty kilometers from shore, and was heading away. Arkadi brought up the missile guidance system’s radar on the big central screen: the long line of the coast, the hard green dot of the research vessel with a little block of white figures beside it.

  “We are waiting for clearance to engage,” he said.

  Katya felt a fluttering agitation in her blood. “To fire missiles at it?”

  Arkadi sipped from his mug of tea. “To head out and capture it. The captain believes that it carries evidence of a psy-war attack on the station, and Central Command is discussing that idea.”

  “He’ll attack anyway, won’t he? Like he did before. Except this time he could start a war.”

  “He will do the right thing.”

  “You know there was no American plot. You know that the miners became infected with something that drove them crazy. You know the survivors are hiding, like the poor man up in the crane.”

  Arkadi studied her for a moment, with a look of regret. “We are friends, you and I. But I am also an officer of the Navy of the People’s Republic, and I serve under the man who saved my life,” he said, and pulled aside the collar of his striped telnyashka shirt to show a white wheal on his shoulder. “I was one of those who had an allergic reaction to pancake-crab spit, on that island.”

  “So you won’t help me,” Katya said.

  “I advise you to let us do our work.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Katya said. “But I had to ask because I’m not sure if I can do this alone.”

  Arkadi’s eyes widened and he dropped his mug of tea and raised his hand. Too late. Katya whacked him on the side of his head with the sock stuffed with dried beans, whacked him again, and his eyes rolled back and he slid out of his chair and fell to the floor. She ransacked his pockets and found a set of keys, then laid him on his side, in the recovery position, and headed toward the nearest hatch.

  No one saw her drop from one of the wings into the cool water—a drop higher than she’d expected, plunging her a good meter below the surface. And although her entire skin tingled with anticipation as she swam to shore, no one raised the alarm or shot at her. She was a strong swimmer: she had met the Navy diver when he had noticed her in the pool of the spa in the Druzhba sanatorium, high in the mountains of Big Island. Wearing only her underwear, she crested confidently through the cool, calm water, her clothes and shoes in a bag belted to her waist. The fog’s vaporous ceiling hung about a meter over the surface; fog drew a veil all around her. It was as if she were swimming in a private bubble.

  As she neared the quay, she heard the barking of the pigs, and, with a pang of regret, wished that she had asked Arkadi to shoot them after she had taken her sample. But he would have probably refused because Captain Chernov wanted to keep them alive to prove his ridiculous theory.

  She hoped Arkadi wouldn’t get into trouble because she had stolen his keys. She hoped he would understand why she’d done it. She hoped he would forgive her.

  No one challenged her when she climbed onto the quay. She ran past the heap of ore to the parked trucks and paused, breathing hard, listening. Nothing but the labored bark of the poor pigs. No shouts or sirens, no warning shots. She squeezed water from her hair and knotted it in a loose ponytail, pulled on her shirt and cargo pants and shoes, and climbed into the cab of the truck at
the far end of the row. She’d driven heavy vehicles like it when, in the long vacation at the end of her first university year, she’d worked at the construction site for the sports center her mother had designed. Power steering, synchromesh gears, no problem. No one challenged her when she pressed the start button and the big engine coughed into life, but as she drove off she saw in the side mirrors a man chasing after her, waving frantically as he fell behind and vanished into the fog.

  The truck rode easily and smoothly up a winding, graded road. Perched in the high, roomy cab, cool air blasting out of the air-conditioning, her clothes drying stiffly, Katya drove as fast as she dared in the fog, navigating by the GPS map in the dashboard screen and red lights set on posts at twenty-meter intervals on either side of the road. A never-ending chain of stars appearing out of the fog, drifting past, vanishing.

  She imagined men running for the trucks, speeding after her. Nothing showed in the side mirrors, but visibility was down to less than twenty meters. She wouldn’t know she was being chased until they were right on the tail of the truck’s hopper.

  The road grew steeper. She shifted down, shifted down again, and at last it topped out. Trying to match the GPS map with reality, she drove past a pair of bulldozers, some kind of mobile conveyer belt, and a string of prefab huts before a terraced cliff horizontally striped with dark ore deposits loomed out of the fog. She turned right, driving across packed dirt, skirting around a spoil heap that rose into streaming whiteness, past the tower and hoppers of a screening plant. Then a faint red light appeared to her left and she turned toward it, realizing with tremendous relief that she had found the road that led to the top of the ridge.

  It switchbacked up steep, wooded slopes. Trees grew on either side, stabbing up into the fog. Some were a little like conifers, or a child’s drawing of conifers: stiff radial branches strung with puffballs of fine needles that condensed water droplets from the fog. Others were hung with what looked like tattered sails, or bunches of ragged, velvety straps that sparkled with condensation in the truck’s headlights. Puffballs and straps and sails were tinted deep purple—Venusian plants used a pigment similar to rhodopsin to capture light for photosynthesis. Fat cushions of black moss saddled between the trees. Everything was dripping wet.

  A shape loomed out of the fog: a yellow, articulated dump truck exactly like the one she was driving, tipped nose down in the deep ditch at the side of the road. She slowed as she went past, craning to look inside the truck’s cab, seeing that it was empty and feeling a measure of relief: feeling that she was on the right track.

  The oppressive shroud of the fog began to lift and break up into streamers caught amongst branches and sails, and she drove on in pewter light, trees thinning to scattered clumps with rough scrub between. The road turned, and gave out abruptly, and a truck was slewed at its end.

  The men had come here, all right. Trying to escape the monsters in their heads by driving out of the fog to the place they came to play and relax.

  Katya drove past the truck, drove across a rough meadow, past a barbecue pit and picnic tables, jolting on up a steepening slope until even in its lowest gear the truck could climb no farther.

  She switched off the motor and swung out of the cab, looked back at the way she had come. A pure white sea stretched toward the horizon, seamlessly melding with the ivory dome of the planet’s permanent cloud cover. The sun was a bright smear low in the east. In less than twenty days, it would set at this latitude, and the long night—117 days long—would begin. Forty kilometers above, a lightning storm flashed and flickered under the cloudroof: she heard the distant, dull percussion of thunder, saw thin, shadowy twists of falling rain that would evaporate before they hit the ground.

  There was still no sign of pursuit, but she did not doubt that she was being followed and began to climb toward the top of the ridge. Steep, stony slopes sparsely stubbled with purple vegetation. Squat vases, skull-sized puffballs, clumps of stiff, thorny whips or tall plumes. The air was very still, weighted with sultry heat. Long shadows tangled everywhere.

  She was sweating hard, out of breath, her pulse hammering in her ears, when at last she reached the top of the ridge and saw the crests of further ridges rising above the fog, parallel rakes stretching toward the distant prospect of a stark mountain range, the beginning of the desert interior. Ahead of her, the broad ridge ran out toward a high prow crowned with a copse of trees.

  A horn blared far below. She felt a spike of alarm, saw a yellow dump truck draw up beside hers, saw three men spill from it.

  As she jogged toward the copse of trees, a speck materialized in the distance, scooting above the shadow it cast on the restless sea of fog, cutting through wisps of drifting vapor, rising as it tracked toward her. It was one of the ekranoplan’s drones, a chunky quadrocopter like a garbage-can lid pierced by a cross, with a caged rotor at the end of each bar of the cross. Its cluster of cameras glinted as it buzzed past her and turned and came back, flying low and fast, a homicidal Frisbee aimed at her head.

  She dropped flat, felt the backwash of the drone’s fans blow over her, pushed to her feet as the quadrocopter curved around and shot toward her again, and ran toward a clump of thorns at the edge of a steep drop. She broke off one of the dead canes in the core of the clump and swung it at the drone, and the machine veered sideways and made a wide turn and came back toward her, moving in cautious, erratic spurts, halting a few meters away.

  There was a metallic clatter and a voice said, “Stay where you are, Doctor. Wait for my men.”

  “Is that you, Captain? If you care to follow me, I’ll lead you to the missing miners.”

  “You disobeyed a direct order, Doctor. But if you come back now, I’ll overlook your transgression.”

  “They climbed up here, looking for a place where they’d be safe,” Katya said, and pointed toward the trees.

  The quadrocopter drone tilted and shot forward, and she jumped over the edge and plowed down the steep slope in a cloud of dust and small stones, fetching up breathless and bleeding in a clump of stiff purple plumes. She had lost the thorn cane. The drone was falling toward her, and she snapped off a plume and thrust it like a spear into one of the machine’s fans.

  There was a grinding noise and a stinging blizzard of shards and splinters sprayed around her and the drone spun past, canted at a steep angle. It tried to turn back toward Katya, and the mismatched thrust of its fans spun it in a death spiral and it struck a shelf of rock and clattered away down the slope, bouncing and shedding parts.

  The three men climbing toward her paused as the wreckage of the drone spun past, then started to climb again.

  It took all of Katya’s strength to scramble back up the slope. She paused at the top, her pulse drumming in her skull, and blotted sweat and blood from her eyes—flying splinters had badly cut her face. The men were much closer now. The chief petty officer shouted something to her, and she turned and limped along the crest of the ridge, hot pain knifing in one ankle. Hot air clamped around her like a fever sheet; the world contracted to the patch of stony dirt directly in front of her feet. She scrambled up a steep gully, mostly on all fours, only realized that she reached the top when the shadows of the trees fell across her.

  They were rooted amongst black boulders, upright trunks soaring skyward, stiff horizontal branches clad in bunches of purple needles. A man lay on his back on a dry litter of fallen needles, eyes shrunken in their sockets, cracked lips flecked with froth. Katya thought he was dead, but then he turned his head toward her and started to tremble and whimper.

  Both his legs were broken. She could see bone sticking out of the shin of his torn trousers. A rifle lay some way off. She supposed that he’d dropped it when he’d fallen.

  She knelt beside him and took one of his hands and asked him where his friends were. His eyes rolled back. She thought he had fainted, then she understood, and looked up. And saw small shadows high up in the jutting branches, half-hidden by puffball clusters of needles. Atavisti
c apes clinging to the safety of their perches.

  Katya held on to the man’s hand as the chief petty officer and two seamen stepped toward her.

  “I don’t know why he didn’t have you killed,” her mother said.

  “Chernov didn’t have a plan,” Katya said. “He had a fixation, a belief that everything that he saw was the result of some fiendish American plot. He was trying to stop me, yes, but he was also trying to rescue me from what he believed to be my own foolishness. When his men saw that I had found the miners, that was the end of it.”

  “I suppose we should for once be grateful for the rigid code of honor men value so highly.”

  “Arkadi called him a hero. And he acted like one.”

  “And now you are the hero. My daughter, who saved the world from war.”

  “From a stupid skirmish created by that rigid code of honor. And I was wrong about too many things to qualify as any kind of hero. I was wrong about what infected the miners, to begin with.”

  They were talking over lunch. Katya and the crew of the ekranoplan had just been released from quarantine, and her mother had whisked her away from the scrum of reporters and onlookers and a crew from the state TV news to the calm of the luncheon room of the Engineers’ Union, with its views across the simmering basin of Kosmograd and the blue curve of Crater Bay.