Old Venus Read online

  Ronson wasn’t happy about the landing either. This wasn’t the first time he’d traveled off-world, but landing on Mars was mild compared to this. He couldn’t blame the guy a few rows back for getting sick. Although the shuttle was no longer airborne, it still remained in motion, slowly bobbing up and down as it was rocked by the ocean. He’d been warned to take Dramamine before boarding, and he was glad he’d heeded the advice.

  Clutching the armrests, Ronson gazed through the oval porthole beside his seat. Rain spattered the outer pane, but he could still see where he was. Not that there was much to look at: ocean for as far as the eye could see—the Venusian horizon was about three miles away, nearly the same as Earth’s at sea level—beneath a slate-colored sky bloated by clouds that had never parted and never would. The shuttle was supposed to make planetfall at Veneragrad, but the floating colony must be on the other side of the spacecraft. Unless, of course, the pilots had miscalculated the colony’s current position and had come down—landed wasn’t the proper word, was it?—in the wrong place.

  That was a possibility. Ronson had spent the last four months in hibernation, but his waking hours aboard the Tsiolkovsky had shown him that Cosmoflot’s reputation for ineptitude was well deserved. He’d just begun to consider the possibility that the shuttle was lost at sea when a tugboat came into view. Smoke belching from its funnel, the rust-flecked craft circled the shuttle until it passed out of sight once again. Several minutes went by, then there was a thump as its crew attached a towline to the shuttle’s prow. The shuttle began to move forward again, the tug hauling it toward its final destination.

  Everyone on his side of the passenger compartment peered through the windows as the shuttle pulled into Veneragrad, including the middle-aged Russian in the aisle seat who unapologetically leaned over Ronson as he craned his head for a look at the man-made island. Veneragrad was as utilitarian as only a Soviet-era artifact could be: a tiered hemisphere a kilometer in diameter, a shade darker than the ocean it floated upon, the long, wooden piers jutting out from its sides giving it the appearance of an enormous, bloated water spider. Rickety-looking platforms, also constructed of native timber, rose as irregularly spaced towers from the outside balconies; they supported the open-top steel tanks that caught the rain and distilled it as the colony’s drinking water. Radio masts and dish antennae jutted out at odd angles from near the top of the dome; a helicopter lifted off from a landing pad on its roof. An ugly, unwelcoming place.

  “Looks bad, yes?” The man seated beside him stared past him. “Better than nothing … it’s dry.”

  Ronson had already learned that his traveling companion spoke English, albeit not very well. His breath reeked of the vodka he swilled from a bag-wrapped bottle on the way down from orbit; he’d opened it as soon as the shuttle entered the atmosphere. “Is this where you live?” he asked, if only for the sake of being polite. “Is this your home, I mean?”

  The other man barked sullen laughter. “This hellhole? No! My home, St. Petersburg. Come here to make money. Sell … um … ah”—he searched for the right word—“computers, yes? Computers for office.”

  Ronson nodded. He wasn’t much interested in making friends with the businessman, but it appeared that conversation was unavoidable. “Whole colony, built in space above Earth, sent here by rockets,” the businessman continued, telling Ronson something he already knew. “Dropped from orbit by para … para …”

  “Parachutes.”

  “Parachutes, yes. Come down”—he lifted his hands—“sploosh! in water.” He waved the bag toward the window. “People then build onto it. Wood from floating … um, forests, yes? Floating forests on moss islands.”

  “Yes, I see.” Again, the businessman wasn’t telling him anything new.

  “Yes, you see.” The Russian took another swig from his bottle, then offered it to Ronson. “So why you come here?”

  Ronson shook his head at the bottle. There were several ways he could get out of this unwanted conversation. He opted for the easiest approach. “I’m a detective,” he said, and when the businessman gave an uncomprehending look, he rephrased his answer in simpler, if inaccurate, terms. “A cop.”

  “A cop. Yes.” The businessman gave him the distrustful look Ronson anticipated, then withdrew the bottle and settled back into his seat.

  Ronson didn’t hear from him again for the rest of the way into port. Which suited him well. He didn’t want to talk about why he’d come to Venus.

  —–—

  The heat hit him as soon as he stepped through the hatch. It was like walking into a sauna; the air was hot and thick, hard to breathe, humid beyond belief. The sun was larger and warmer here than on Earth, yet little more than a bright smear in the sky that heated up the atmosphere. Ronson began to sweat even before he reached the end of the wooden gangway that led from the hatch to the pier where the shuttle had been berthed. A fine, almost misty rain was falling, and it too was warm; he didn’t know whether to take off the denim jacket he’d worn on the way down or keep it on. The dockworkers didn’t seem to mind. Most of them wore only shorts, sneakers, and sometimes a rain hat, with the women wearing bikini tops or sports bras. They unloaded the bags from the cargo bay, and Ronson took a few moments to find his suitcase before walking the rest of the way down the pier to the spaceport entrance.

  There were only a couple of customs officers on duty, bored-looking Russians in short-sleeve uniform shirts who regarded the line of passengers with bureaucratic disdain. The officer Ronson approached silently examined his passport and declaration form, gave his face a quick glance, then put his stamp on everything and shrugged him toward an adjacent arch. No one had asked him to open his bag, but he knew what was about to happen. Sure enough, bells rang from the arch as soon as he walked through it. Its weapons detector had found the gun he was carrying.

  Just as well. It only meant that he’d meet the police sooner than he had planned.

  An hour of sitting alone in a detention area, another half hour of angry interrogation by a port-authority officer whose English wasn’t much better than the businessman’s, then Ronson was loaded onto an electric cart and spirited to police headquarters. Along the way, he got what amounted to a nickel tour of Veneragrad. The colony seemed to consist mainly of narrow corridors with low ceilings and low-wattage light fixtures, their grey steel walls decorated with grime, handprints, and stenciled Cyrillic signs, then the cart passed through a broad doorway and Ronson suddenly found himself in the city center: a vast atrium, its skylight ceiling a couple of hundred meters above the floor, with interior balconies overlooking a central plaza. As the cart cut across the plaza, Ronson caught glimpses of Veneragrad’s daily life. Residents in shorts, vests, and T-shirts resting on park benches, hanging laundry on balcony clotheslines, standing in line in front of fast-food kiosks. A group of schoolchildren sitting cross-legged near a fountain, listening as their young teacher delivered a lesson. Two men in a heated argument; another couple of men watching with amusement.

  A statue of V. I. Lenin stood in the center of the plaza. Incongruously dressed in a frock coat and high-collar shirt no Venusian colonist would be caught dead wearing—even inside the city, the air was tropically warm—he pointed toward some proud socialist future just ahead. But the statue was old and stained, and a broken string that might have once been a yo-yo dangled from the tip of his finger. The Communist Party was just as dead on Venus as it was on Earth; it was just taking the locals a little longer to get rid of its relics.

  The cart entered another dismal corridor, then came to a halt in front of a pair of battered doors painted with a faded red star. The port-authority officer who’d questioned Ronson ushered him through the crowded police station to a private office, and it was here that he met Arkandy Bulgakov.

  Veneragrad’s police chief was about Ronson’s own age, short and broad-chested, with the short-banged Caesar haircut that never seems to go out of style with European men. Seated at a desk piled with paperwork, he listene
d patiently while the officer delivered a stiff-toned report of the visitor’s offense, punctuated by placing Ronson’s Glock on the desk along with its extra clips, then Bulgakov murmured something and waved the officer out of the room. He waited until the door was shut, then he sighed and shook his head.

  “You’re the same guy who e-mailed me a while ago about the missing kid?” His English was Russian-accented but otherwise perfect.

  “That’s me.” Ronson motioned to an empty chair in front of the desk; Bulgakov nodded, and he sat down. “Sorry about the gun. I was going to tell you about it when I reported in, but …”

  “We don’t allow private ownership of firearms. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I figured that my license might exempt me.”

  “No exemptions here. Only police are allowed to carry lethal weapons.” Bulgakov’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward to pick up the Glock; he briefly weighed it in his hand before opening a drawer and dropping it in. “I won’t fine you, but you may not carry this. I’ll give you a receipt. You may reclaim it when you leave.”

  “All right, but what am I supposed to use until then? I might need a sidearm, you know.”

  “To find a missing person? I doubt it.” Catching Ronson’s look, the chief shrugged. “You can buy a Taser if it makes you feel better, but only if you’re going outside the city. And if that’s the case, then your chances of finding this fellow …”

  “David Henry.”

  “… David Henry alive are practically zero. At any rate, he’s not in Veneragrad, I can tell you that right now.”

  “That’s what you told me five months ago,” Ronson said, “and that’s what I told my client, too. But the old man isn’t satisfied. His kid was last seen here nearly a year ago, when he came to Venus on a trip his dad bought him as a college-graduation gift.”

  Bulgakov raised a querulous eyebrow. “His father must be rich.”

  “The family has a few bucks, yeah, and the kid likes to travel. He’s already been to the Moon and Mars, so I guess Venus was next on his list. Personally, if he was my boy, I would’ve given him a watch, but …”

  “We don’t have many tourists, but we do get some. His kind is not unfamiliar. Privileged children coming to see the wonders of Venus”—a brief smirk—“such as they are. They go out to the vine islands, take pictures, collect a few souvenirs. Now and then they get in trouble … a bar fight, dope, soliciting a prostitute … and they wind up here. But they eventually go home and that’s the end of their adventure.”

  “That’s not how it ended for him. He didn’t come home.”

  “So it appears.” Bulgakov turned to the antique computer on one side of his desk. He typed something on the keyboard, then swiveled the breadbox-size CRT around so that Ronson could see the screen. “This is him, yes?”

  Displayed on the screen was a passport photo of a young man in his early twenties: moonfaced, arrogant blue eyes, sandy hair cut close on the sides and mousse-spiked on top. Good-looking but spoiled. The same boy in the picture his father had given Ronson when he’d visited the family home in Colorado Springs. “That’s him.”

  Bulgakov turned the screen back around, typed in something else, paused to read the information that appeared. “He was registered at the Gastinitsa Venera,” he said after a few seconds, “but failed to check out. When my detectives went there to investigate, they were told that his luggage was found in his room, which apparently he hadn’t visited for several days before his scheduled departure aboard the Gagarin. My men visited all the restaurants, shops, and bars, and although he’d been noticed in some of them, no one who worked in those places had seen him recently. And, of course, he failed to appear at the Cosmoflot departure gate to make his shuttle flight.”

  “You told me this already, remember? In your e-mail.” This was a waste of time. Which was what he’d expected; local police were seldom much help in missing-person cases. Still, he always made a point of checking in with the cops. Professional courtesy, mainly, but there was always the chance that he might learn something he could use.

  “So I did, and I imagine that you shared the information with gospodin Henry. And when he contacted the Russian consulate in Washington … he did this, yes?… he told them this as well.” Bulgakov leaned back in his chair. “Very well, let me tell you what I didn’t say in my e-mail, because the government back home doesn’t like to admit certain things and would be upset with me if I stated them in an official letter. On occasion … not often, but every once in a while … a young man like David Henry disappears while visiting Venus. Sometimes he wanders down the docks after he has been drinking all night, falls off a pier, and drowns, and his body is devoured by scavenger eels. That has happened. Sometimes he goes out on a boat tour with an unlicensed operator who’s actually a criminal, who robs him, murders him, and leaves his body to rot on an island. That’s happened, too. And sometimes … well, worse things happen.”

  “Such as?”

  Bulgakov hesitated. “You’ve heard of vityazka, haven’t you?”

  “Yaz? Who hasn’t?”

  “That’s the street name back home. Vityazka iz kornia is what it’s called here.” Bulgakov warmed to the subject. “It’s derived from the same slickbark trees that grow on some of the vine islands and from which the pharmaceutical industry has bioharvested korenmedicant, a clinical analgesic used in hospitals. But while koren comes from tree bark, vityazka comes from the roots. A narcotic as addictive as heroin …”

  “And tastes just as bad when you smoke it,” Ronson finished. “Know all about yaz. It’s all over America and Europe.”

  Bulgakov scowled. He clearly didn’t like being interrupted. “What you probably aren’t aware of is exactly how the smugglers are getting it. Their growers … yaz croppers, we call them … go out to islands where slickbark trees are found. On the islands the drug companies have already harvested, they recover the tree roots left behind and process them for yaz. But everything that goes into this … cutting, boiling, curing … is hard work, not something anyone willingly wants to do. So sometimes they’ll abduct some poor tourist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and force him into hard labor.”

  “And you think that’s what happened to David Henry? He was shanghaied?”

  “I’d say that’s a strong possibility.”

  Ronson slowly let out his breath. His job had just become much more difficult. “If you’re right, then how do I find him? I understand those islands can drift quite a long distance …”

  “There are thousands of them being carried by the ocean currents, and the croppers do a good job staying hidden. My people have always had trouble tracking them down. Locating the boy on one particular island will be difficult.” Bulgakov paused. “However, there may be a way. As you Americans say, it’s a long shot, but …”

  “As we Americans say, I’m all ears.”

  “Talk to a froghead.”

  “A what?”

  “Frogheads. The native aborigines. No one calls them Venusians … sounds like a bad movie. Anyway, they’re intelligent”—another smirk—“although I wouldn’t call them good company. And they see a lot of what goes on here.”

  “I can’t even speak Russian. How am I supposed to talk to …?”

  “I know someone who does. Mad Mikhail. You can find him down on the docks. Bring lots of rubles.” Bulgakov smiled. “And chocolate, too.”

  “Chocolate?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Mad Mikhail hung out on the waterfront. Everyone who worked there knew who he was; all Ronson had to do was follow their pointing fingers to a small shack set up on the dock where the tour boats were moored.

  Mad Mikhail made sushi from whatever he’d been brought by local fishermen, which he then sold to tourists. When Ronson found him, he was sitting on a stool inside his open-sided shack, cutting up something that looked like a cross between a squid and a lionfish and wrapping the filets around wads of sticky rice. He was a squat old man with
a potbelly and fleshy arms and legs, his dense white beard nearly reaching his collarbone. His skin was wrinkled and rain-bleached, and he wore nothing but a frayed straw hat and baggy shorts; when he looked up at Ronson, it was with eyes both sharp and vaguely mystical.

  “Sushi?” he asked, his rasping voice thickened by a Ukrainian accent. “Fresh today. Very good. Try some.”

  Bulgakov had warned Ronson not to eat anything Mad Mikhail offered him; whatever he failed to sell today, he’d simply keep until tomorrow even if it had been spoiled by the heat and humidity. At least he spoke English. “No thanks. I’ve been told you can help me. I want to talk to a froghead.”

  Mikhail’s eyes narrowed. “They are not frogheads. They are the Water Folk, the Masters of the World Ocean. You do not respect them, you do not talk to them.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know they …”

  Mikhail slammed the long knife he’d been using down on the counter before him. “No one knows this! They call them frogheads, make jokes about them. Only I”—he jabbed a scarred thumb against his bare chest—“make friends with them when I came here over thirty years ago! Only Mikhail Kronow …!”

  “You’ve been on Venus thirty years?” Ronson seized the chance to change the subject. “That means you would have belonged to one of the first expeditions.”

  “Da.” He nodded vigorously, not smiling but at least no longer shouting. “Second expedition, 1978. Chief petty officer, Soviet Space Force.” A smile appeared within the white nest of whiskers. “The others went home, but I stayed. No one in Veneragrad been here longer …!”