Old Venus Read online

  “Of course.”

  She had told him that her city, Lacertan, led an alliance of liberal and independent cloud-cities known as The Band. The other major bloc was an empire, run on military lines, centered on a vast sky raft called Rapton. Empire and Band were currently, technically, at peace, but the covert maneuvering was vicious: this was the situation that had cost Gemin his life. The dirty story hadn’t been released, it was too inflammatory. The official line was that he’d been killed in a caving accident, on an expedition to one of the old ocean beds; and tragically it had been impossible to recover his body.

  It was a prospecting expedition, said Sekool. In disputed territory, where there are rich pickings, and they ran into trouble. He shouldn’t have been there at all, of course.

  They disembarked, smiling for the welcoming committee, in their desert robes and battered wilderness clothes. The Man From-the-Sky was instantly surrounded by officials and Venusian-style media folk. He didn’t speak to Sekool again for a while.

  Forrest didn’t get to watch the return of the bright: Lacertan was riding strong winds and everyone was indoors, sleeping or not. But after that, the city—which had been quiet as an Arctic night—began to bustle. Washed, brushed, and dressed in Venusian formal style; provided with fine accommodation and service, he was swept from reception to reception. He ate high-class delicacies, no better or worse than the same absurd fancywork in New York or London. He talked (in like-for-like translation) with many interesting Venusians, and had no trouble passing for a denizen of the upper atmosphere. Contact between the realms was minimal, he was their first actual visitor: a Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan.

  Perhaps the most personally interesting fact he picked up was that Lizard Men, like the naked ghost boy, had no tails. Which explained a couple of things.

  He met Sekool again at his private audience with the Master of the City.

  The simulacrum he’d seen had been a flattering portrait. In life, the Master was a wraith in a medicalized cocoon, though his eyes, appraising Forrest with great interest, were still sharp. Sekool was at the bedside, in a dark blue formal gown: the first time he’d been close to her since the cable car. Raised on pillows, the Master offered greetings translated by an aide wearing a headset. Forrest had arranged for the orrery watch to be boxed and wrapped, in suitable style. He offered it with misgiving, hoping that the gift at least looked impressive, but the old man fizzed and crackled with a connoisseur’s delight.

  “The Master is pleased,” reported the aide. “He says the orbits of our planet and our near neighbor present a pretty problem. He has never seen the puzzle worked in craft with such elegance and charm. He suggests you must twin your soul with my lady’s brother, our Chief Scientist, who is also fascinated by the third world.”

  Then the Master was tired, and they were both dismissed.

  She donned a headset as soon as they were clear of the Master’s apartments. “I think you have no engagements just now, sir. Let me show you a view over the city.”

  The view from the terrace was not dazzling, they were hemmed by blank walls and the defensive redoubt that protected the Residence. But there was a glimpse of bright cloud above, and more rosy greenery than he’d seen elsewhere.

  “So that’s my marriage,” she said, pacing. “He was a good leader, now he’s old, and deathly sick. But he’s not senile and he doesn’t want to let go, so that’s that. He’s just forgotten how he’s paralyzing me: paralyzing the whole city—”

  Her hair, grown out, ran in natural, feathery cornrows to her nape. She wore classy makeup, there were jewels at her throat. The gown was daringly décolleté in the back, at the swell of her tail’s root. But he missed her jungle pants.

  “You think I’m speaking very freely? Don’t worry, everyone knows how I feel. Including the Master. Nobody’s going to blab indiscretions in your company, Johnforrest. These things.” She tapped her headset. “Are notoriously easy to hack.”

  “What does the Master think about what happened to your son?”

  “That the accident was in disputed territory, and anything’s better than war. That I can marry again when he dies and have other children. Or adopt, it’s been done before. That he’ll negotiate, when he’s stronger (which will never happen, he’s dying). I can’t bear to tell him how real my son’s suffering still is to me. So I just have to wait.”

  The people of Lacertan, Forrest had learned, were a godless lot of sophisticated animists, like Sekool herself. They were liberal, they were easy, but the idea of their prince lying untended, “trapped in his death,” at the bottom of some hole, gave them the horrors. And they weren’t visited by that crawling corpse.

  He knew he was talking to a desperate woman and forgave her many things.

  “What about my twin soul? Your brother, the Chief Scientist?”

  “Esbwe? Who knows? He’s an eccentric genius, he lives in a world of his own.”

  The smile he loved fought with the pain. “Enjoy the rest of your visit. You may not have been following the reckoning, we’ve come a long way since you boarded. We’ll soon pass over the spot where you and I met, then I suppose you’ll leave us.”

  That’s it, thought Forrest. He’d been wondering when he was due to disappear.

  So be it.

  The Chief Scientist worked in a surprisingly shabby old building, in a heritage area close to the Residence. He didn’t seem overburdened with staff, either. Possibly “Chief Scientist” was a courtesy title? The Minister for Science—who had escorted Forrest, only to be left twisting her tail in an anteroom—had been reticent on the subject.

  Forrest was ushered into a big, shiny laboratory, full of expensive-looking equipment. A Lizard Man, in a black smock and white pants (Venusian-style professional clothing) stood peering into a clear tank, affecting to be unaware of the visitor. They were alone, and Esbwe definitely was the guy Forrest had glimpsed in the mirror-screen—

  “Come and look at this, sir. Look into the visor and keep your hands to yourself.”

  Forrest walked over, and obeyed. The tank seemed empty. Then tiny moving dots appeared, and took on form: became twisting strands that divided and recombined—

  “What do you see?”

  “Er, the living material of cell signatures?”

  “Life, sir! On our world all life is doomed, that is beyond doubt. But I have calculated that the third world has a biosphere, and my great project is to infect it. As soon as I’ve perfected my delivery system, those animacula will be injected through the clouds, they will cross the airless deeps. And something of us may survive.”

  “A noble dream,” said Forrest politely.

  “You don’t believe me. How could one of us be an Interplanetarian? You gave the Master that orbit-tracking toy for a joke, I’m sure. You forget that the skies above our levels were often clear, before our habitats were launched. You overlook the fact that we cloud-dwellers hold a wealth of astronomical knowledge; observations many thousands of years old—”

  “I find Lacertan science very impressive.”

  The scientist stared unpleasantly, curling his lip in an ugly shadow of her smile.

  “How generous! I’m not one of the idiots who’ve been fawning over you, Mr. From-the-Sky. To me, the sky habitats are the enemy, the Rapt are our natural allies. The sooner we can join the empire, the better I’ll be pleased, and I don’t care if you take that message home.”

  “My headset is malfunctioning,” said Forrest, mugging puzzlement. “I can’t understand a word. I must try to come back another time. So sorry.”

  —–—

  Forrest didn’t need her to know he was a willing victim. Regrettably, he’d be safer if she didn’t. But now he felt they had to have a frank discussion. Maybe it was a fatal, irresistible temptation: be that as it may, luckily or unluckily, he knew the right venue for a meeting—in this city where she’d warned him everything he said and heard was monitored.

  He placed a personal call to Esbwe and
left a message confirming his second visit to the lab, naming a time after Lacertan office hours.

  “Falling asleep in the daytime” was discouraged by incessant bursts of public music. A loud and melodious call to quiet relaxation was fading, as Forrest entered the shabby old building. Nobody about. He stationed himself around the corner from the lab and waited.

  Sekool arrived. He was right behind her as she unlocked the doors.

  “I thought that would smoke you out.”

  “Excuse me? I was expecting to meet my brother.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to turn up,” said Forrest, following her inside.

  He’d chased his spoken message with an automated cancellation, which she wouldn’t have seen. Not that he cared if Esbwe came along. A frank exchange of views would be fine!

  “Sekool, we need to talk, and I know this room is safe. I don’t think even your crazy brother would have risked the kind of open sedition I heard from him earlier, if Homeland Security were listening in. I knew this lab was firewalled, anyway,” he added, deliberately. “You made a videocall, from the great heart refuge. I saw him in here, when the two of you were planning how to use me in a hostage exchange—”

  Her big green eyes got bigger, but she kept her head. No panic, no fluster. “So you know. All right … I was desperate, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went hunting for a suitable opposition candidate, I ran into you, and the plan changed—”

  “Yeah. I was to be kinsnipped, after you left … But then you had a better idea. I’m clear with all that. I just don’t know why the hell Esbwe’s involved. That arrogant idiot is going to destroy you, Sekool. Did you know he’s seriously planning to sell this city to the Rapt? How do you think the Master, how d’you think your people, would like the sound of that?”

  “Esbwe talks a lot of nonsense, nobody listens. I needed his expertise.”

  But suddenly it was personal. They were two people who had been intensely intimate, but not very talkative. Here they were alone again, and the silence was falling apart—

  “And he has a right,” said Sekool, her big eyes shamed and defiant. “An inalienable right, to help me recover our son’s body.”

  “My God … Are you saying your brother is, is your boy’s father?”

  She recoiled. “I know. I know how it sounds, but Johnforrest, I couldn’t marry him. He was erratic even then. He had no reputation, he’s no leader, he was totally unsuitable. I let myself get pregnant, but I married the Master. It made sense to me. My husband would die. I could never marry Esbwe. But he’d be beside me, our son would inherit—”

  You learn something new every day, thought Forrest … So, talent gets courted and rewarded, dynastic power stays with the blood royal—

  “Maybe not such good sense to Esbwe.”

  “Maybe not … I asked his help, I owed him that. It’s illegal, of course: a simulacrum isn’t supposed to have a life span, but the deal is acceptable, it’s been accepted. What I did to you, to get what we needed, was theft, and I’m sorry—”

  “A simulacrum,” repeated Forrest, stunned. “A flishatatonaton—”

  “Yes? A short-lived fleshly automaton, for a dead boy. A fair trade, I thought, and we have a good chance of getting away with it. The Rapt refuse to admit they’re holding Gemin, and they’d love to know more about the sky habitats, even what little they can learn from an ephemeral puppet, but they won’t want to admit that side of the deal, either—”

  So much for my heroics, thought Forrest. And she was bold, she was crazy-reckless, his Woodsong, but maybe Forrest was the one who needed forgiving—

  “Sekool, it’s not going to work. I’m not, er, what you think I am.”

  “I know.”

  “You know—?”

  “Of course. Esbwe’s convinced you’re a sky-dweller, but he makes puppets: I’m a doctor. In my world, boy babies’ tails are excised, at birth or soon after; the nonexistent gods only know why. Yours has never been excised, it’s vestigial and internal. That’s what I first noticed, but then, your entire skeleton is different. Not deformed, different; organs too. Your cell signature is legible, and obviously functional, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe I took a mad risk, but I did you no harm and I thought you’d be far away, and never know.” Her long smile broke out, uncertainly. “I’m sure you have resources I can’t imagine, hidden somewhere in the sek where I found you—”

  “No, I don’t,” said Forrest. “No resources, ma’am. I’m a shipwrecked sailor.”

  Her hand went to the pouch at her throat, she stared at him in amazement—

  Then a man screamed. A hideous sound: high-pitched, jagged, and brutal. Forrest looked wildly around the empty lab. But Sekool leapt across the room, and slapped her palm on a touch pad. The wall beside her opened silently. Within the space revealed, a naked man sat strapped to a chair: flushed and dripping sweat, a headset clasping his skull, tools of torture attached to his body. The Chief Scientist stood by, thoughtfully adjusting his instruments.

  The naked man was Forrest.

  Sekool went up and stood over the chair. “The Rapt would have been kinder. Esbwe, you are disgusting. This was not in the bargain.”

  “What’s he doing here?” snarled Esbwe, backing away and glaring at Forrest. “Now we’ll have to eliminate the bastard, and that wasn’t in the bargain.”

  “I’ve been living under a madman’s heel,” said Sekool, in dawning wonder, taking out her knife. “I did you a cruel injustice once, Esbwe. I can’t undo it. But enough is enough.”

  Esbwe howled in fury. “Don’t touch it! It’s mine!”

  A lash of her tail sent him skidding into a wall. The knife plunged, violent and precise, into the hollow of the doll’s collarbone. She stared at the wet ruin.

  “I don’t know why I never realized,” she murmured. “I don’t have to wait. I can seize power, I can make my own rules, give myself in place of Gemin if I must.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Forrest. “Sekool, when I thought you were going to hand me over in person, I was willing. I’m still willing. I’ll handle the hostage crisis. I’ve done the work before. Trust me, I’ll bring your son’s body home, and I’ll be fine—”

  “Why would you do that, man from somewhere else?”

  Forrest, smiling with his eyes, drew her close, and kissed her brow—

  But something was happening. Were the palace guards rushing in? No, it was his hands, they were breaking up, vanishing. He felt a shock, strangely familiar, this had happened to him before … It was PoTolo’s method. The sky raft must be over the drop zone.

  “Sekool! Wait for me! I can’t stop this, but I’ll come back!”

  She laid her hand against his heart. “I know.”

  3. THE BLACK STONE

  WHEN THE ORBITS WERE ALIGNED ONCE MORE, JOHN FORREST returned to West Africa to repeat his stunt for a select group of scientists. He arrived before the guests and joined Dr. PoTolo, alone in the lab. Nothing much had changed, in the room with the big windows looking out to the sunset horizon. John Forrest, dressed as before in wilderness kit, also seemed unchanged; except that he was in a better temper.

  “That thing,” he said, nodding at the oily black globe in its chamber. “Your time-travel gizmo. Does it have to be held like that, in the container?”

  “No, it just has to be in the room.”

  “What happens if I touch it? Sudden death? Radiation sickness?”

  “You can touch it. I wouldn’t advise you to keep it in your pocket for a week,” said PoTolo, a little bolder, a little less intimidated, this time.

  “You’re dispatching me to the exact place and time where you picked me up?”

  “As requested, I’ll be using the complex of space-time values recorded during the successful retrieval. But you should know, Mr. Forrest, it isn’t that simple.”

  On the previous occasion Forrest had disappeared at sunset and reappeared, mysteriously bedraggled, an hour before dawn. T
he interval (in local time, West Africa) did not, necessarily, indicate the length of his stay, or even prove that Forrest had arrived on the surface, and Forrest was no help. It was puzzling. But the proof that the probe had visited a habitable Ancient Venus was safely recorded in the data, and it was very, very convincing.

  “You still remember nothing?”

  Forrest puckered his lower lip and shook his head. “Nothing at all, alas.”

  “We’ll do better this time. We have a memory-retrieval brain scanner on hand, we’ll pluck the images straight from your head before they can vanish.”

  Forrest smiled politely, thinking of Sekool, the sorceress.

  Her promise, which he was about to put to the test.

  The guests assembled. There was some chatter, some flattery. He stood in the gate.

  All eyes were on the human element in the apparatus. Nobody noticed that the globe had gone from its place. Hands in his pockets, he looked to the west, where Hawa herself was lost in cloud, but the stars that he would never see again were beginning to shine out.

  The world disappeared.

  JOE HALDEMAN

  Here’s a pilot on a desperate rescue mission after a disaster on Venus who soon finds that he might need rescuing himself … and who makes a discovery that changes everything we know about life.

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the seventies. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1984 for the best science-fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His story “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tools of the Trade, The Coming, the mainstream novel 1968, Camouflage (which won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr., Award), Old Twentieth, The Accidental Time Machine, Marsbound, and Starbound. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and nonfiction, War Stories. As editor, he has produced the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, Nebula Award Stories 17, and, with Martin H. Greenberg, Future Weapons of War. His most recent books are a new science-fiction novel, Earthbound, a big retrospective collection, The Best of Joe Haldeman, and a novel Work Done for Hire. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.