Old Venus Read online

  “Then, Chief Petty Officer Kronow, you’re the person I need to see.” The best way to handle Mad Mikhail would be to appeal to his vanity. “I’d like to speak with the Water Folk … or rather, have you speak with them on my behalf since you know them so well.”

  Mikhail’s gaze became suspicious. “About what? If it’s only a picture you want … pfft! Fifteen hundred rubles, they come up, you stand next to them, I take your picture. Take it home, put it on the wall. ‘See, there’s me with the frogheads.’ ” Disgusted, he spat over the side of the dock.

  “I’m not a tourist, and I don’t want a picture.” Ronson reached into the pocket of his trousers—he’d have to buy shorts soon; his Earth clothes were beginning to stick to him—and produced the snapshot of David Henry his father had given him. Holding it beneath the shack’s awning so that the rain wouldn’t get it wet, he showed it to Mikhail. “I’m looking for this person. He came here almost a year ago, then disappeared. His family sent me here to find him.”

  Mad Mikhail took the photo, closely inspected it. “I do not know this boy,” he said at last, “but the Water Folk would. If he went out to sea, they would have seen him. They see everyone who goes out into the World Ocean. You have chocolate?”

  Ronson had purchased a handful of Cadbury bars at the hotel shop. He pulled them out and showed them to Mikhail. The old man said nothing but simply gave him a questioning look. Ronson found his money clip, peeled off several high-denomination notes, held them up. Mikhail thought it over for a moment. “Very well,” he said at last, easing himself down from his stool. “Come with me.”

  He emerged from the shack wielding a cricket bat, the sort an Englishman would carry to a sports field. Taking the money and the chocolate bars from Ronson, he led the detective down the dock, passing the boats tied up alongside. Captains and crew members lounging on their decks watched him with amusement; someone called to him in Russian and the others laughed, but Mad Mikhail only scowled and ignored them.

  He and Ronson reached the end of the dock. A wooden light post rose above the water slurping against the dock’s edge. The former cosmonaut raised the cricket bat and, with both hands, slammed it against the post: two times, pause, then two more times, another pause, then two more times after that. Mikhail stopped, peered out over the water, and waited a minute. Then he hit the post six more times, two beats apiece.

  “This is how you summon fro … the Water Folk?” Ronson wondered if he was wasting his time.

  “Yes.” Mikhail turned his head back and forth, searching. “They hear vibrations, come to see why I call them. They do this for no one but me.”

  He’d barely completed his third repetition when, one at a time, three dark blue mounds breached from the rain-spattered surface just a couple of meters from the dock. With a chill, Ronson found himself being studied by three pairs of slitted eyes the color of tarnished pewter. Those eyes were all he could see for a few moments, then Mikhail held up the chocolate bars and the creatures swam closer.

  “Move back and give them room,” Mikhail said quietly. “Do not speak to them. They will not understand you.”

  One by one, the Venusian natives emerged from the water, climbing up onto the dock until they stood before Ronson and Mikhail. Each stood about a meter and a half in height, the size of a boy, and were bipedal, but their resemblance to humans ended there. They looked like a weird hybrid of a frog, a salamander, and a dolphin: sloping, neckless heads, broad-mouthed and lipless, with protruding eyes; sleek hairless bodies, streamlined and mammalian, their slender arms and legs ending in webbed, four-fingered hands and broad, paddlelike feet; short dorsal fins running down their backs, away from blowholes that vibrated slightly with each breath and tapered off as reptilian tails that barely touched the wet planks of the dock.

  Ronson couldn’t see any anatomical differences between males and females even though he knew that the natives had two genders. Each were naked, their light blue underbellies revealing no obvious genitalia; only subtle splotches and stripes upon their wine-colored skin distinguished one individual from another.

  And they smelled. As they came out of the water, his nose picked up a fetid, organic odor that reminded him of an algae bloom in summer. The stench was offensive enough to make him step back, and not just because Mad Mikhail had asked him to do so. If they came any closer, he was afraid he’d lose his lunch.

  Ronson had recently read a magazine article about how an Egyptian-American scientist, who’d perished during a dust storm on Mars, had discovered just before his death certain genetic evidence linking Homo sapiens to the native aborigines of the Red Planet. He wondered if much the same link might exist between the people of Earth and the Water Folk of Venus, and was both intrigued and disgusted by the thought he might be related, in some distant way, to these … frogheads.

  Mikhail unwrapped the chocolate bars and offered them to the natives. As he did so, he addressed them in a low, warbling croak: “Wor-worg wokka kroh woka.” It sounded like nonsense to Ronson, but the Water Folk apparently understood him. The ones on the left and right bobbed their heads up and down and responded in kind—“Worgga kroh wohg”—and moved toward him in a waddling, forward-hunched gait that might have been clumsy if it hadn’t been so fast.

  Only the native in the center remained where it was. It watched its companions with what seemed to be disdain as they each took a chocolate bar from Mikhail. When they opened their mouths, Ronson was startled to see that they contained rows of short, sharp teeth, with slightly longer incisors at the corners of the upper set. He was even more startled by the way they gobbled down the chocolate bars. Repulsively long tongues snatched the candy from their webbed hands; chocolate bars that even a hungry child might have taken a couple of minutes to eat were devoured in seconds. And yet the third froghead—Ronson couldn’t help but to think of it that way—refused the bar that Mikhail held out to it.

  “Why doesn’t it take it?” Ronson whispered.

  “I do not know,” Mikhail murmured; he was a bit surprised himself. “They have never done that before.” He raised his voice again. “Wagga kroh?”

  “Kroh wogko!” The third froghead’s tail swung back and forth in what seemed to be an angry gesture, its dull silver eyes narrowing menacingly. “Kroh wogko wakkawog!”

  “What did it say?”

  Mikhail didn’t respond at once. He held out the bar for another moment or two, then slipped it in his pocket. The other two Water Folk made hissing noises that sounded like protests, but the third one stopped thrashing its tail and appeared to calm down a little. “The one in the middle is the leader,” Mikhail said softly. “She …”

  “You can tell it’s a she?”

  “Their leaders are always females. She refused the chocolate because … I think … she said it’s poisonous.” He shrugged. “I am not sure. I speak their language, yes, but some words of theirs I do not know well.”

  “But this is the first time you’ve seen any of them refuse chocolate?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve been giving it to them for many years. They love kroh. Nothing else like it on Venus. This is how I have made friends with them, learned how to talk to them.” A thoughtful pause. “I do not know why one of them would refuse to take it. Very strange.”

  “Well, that’s interesting, but I’ve got a job to do.” Ronson pulled out David Henry’s photo again. “Show this to them,” he said as he handed it to Mikhail, “and ask if they’ve seen him.”

  The reaction was immediate. The moment Mikhail held up the photo, all three frogheads became agitated. Their tails swished back and forth, sometimes slapping the dock boards, as their heads bobbed up and down. They hissed, the leathery tips of their tongues slipping in and out of their mouths, and air whistled from their blowholes. Then the clan leader pointed to the photo and spoke in a rapid stream of angry-sounding croaks.

  “Oh, yes … they recognize him, all right.” Mikhail was just as surprised as Ronson. “And I do not think they like him very m
uch.”

  “I kinda figured that. Ask if they know where he is.”

  Mikhail addressed the frogheads again, and once more they responded with head bobs and tail slaps. Then the leader bent almost double, shifted slightly to the left, and raised her tail to point to the left. Mikhail listened as she spoke to him at length, then he turned to Ronson.

  “She knows where he is … on a moss island that’s now some distance from here. She said she will lead us to him, but only if we will take him away.”

  “That’s exactly what I want.” Then he darted a look at Mikhail. “You said ‘we’?”

  Mad Mikhail smiled at him. “Unless you think you can speak to them, I will have to go with you, yes? And I will have to hire a boat, yes?”

  Ronson knew without asking that the fee was going to be considerable. But he’d brought plenty of rubles with him, and he could always recoup his expenses from his client. “All right. Tell them that we …”

  Mikhail didn’t have a chance to translate. With no more conversation, the three frogheads suddenly turned and dove off the dock. Their bodies barely made a splash as they disappeared into the dark water. In an instant, they were gone.

  “That was fast,” Ronson muttered.

  “We have an understanding. They will come back tomorrow morning.” Mikhail turned away from the dock’s edge, started walking back toward his shack. “Be here then. I will hire a boat and pilot to take us where they lead us. Dasvidan’ye.”

  “See you later.” At least he’d have time to buy new clothes and the equipment he’d need—namely a Taser, seeing that was the only kind of weapon he was permitted to carry. Yet he couldn’t help but notice the guarded expression on Mad Mikhail’s face and wonder if there was something the old man wasn’t telling him.

  The Aphrodite was a beat-up fishing boat with rain-warped deck planks and a wooden hull that appeared to have been patched many times. To Ronson’s surprise, its captain was an American: Bart Angelo, middle-aged and a bit warped himself, smelling of fish and with ivory hair thinning at the top of his head. Forty thousand rubles was a lot to pay for the charter of a weathered old tub, but Ronson had little choice in the matter. He talked Angelo down to thirty-five thousand, and was grateful that he wouldn’t have to also pay for a crew that the captain had decided to leave behind.

  The frogheads returned, just as Mikhail said they would. Ronson assumed they were the same three he’d met yesterday, but he couldn’t tell for sure. They didn’t climb on the dock again, though, but instead lingered in the water beside the Aphrodite, half-submerged eyes steadily watching the men as they prepared to leave. Ronson wondered how they’d known which boat they’d use; Mikhail told him that they’d simply waited until they spotted him and Ronson again, then followed them to the Aphrodite.

  “They are not animals,” Mikhail added, giving him a stern look. “The Water Folk are intelligent … never forget that.”

  Hearing this, Angelo laughed out loud. “If they’re so damn smart, then how come they keep getting tangled in my nets?”

  “And what happens when they do?” Mikhail asked.

  “They chew their way out.” The captain finished counting the wad of money Ronson had just handed him and shoved it in his shorts pocket. “Goddamn critters cost me a repair bill whenever they do that.”

  Mikhail smiled knowingly. He didn’t reply, though, but instead went aft to loosen the stern line. Ronson heard him murmur something in Russian; he had no idea what he’d said, but it sounded rather amused.

  The frogheads joined the Aphrodite as it chugged out of Veneragrad’s harbor. They swam alongside until the boat passed the outer buoys, then moved out front and surfed its bow wake as the boat picked up speed, occasionally breaching the surface just as if they were dolphins. Ronson was concerned at first that the captain would run them down, but once Angelo throttled up the diesel engines to twenty knots, the Water Folk returned to their previous positions. They had no difficulty keeping up with the boat; never once did Ronson or Mikhail completely lose sight of them.

  Veneragrad gradually disappeared behind them, becoming smaller and smaller until it faded into the misty, perpetual rain. Long before it vanished over the horizon, though, they saw other signs of the human presence on Venus. They passed fishing schooners and tour boats heading out for the day, and at one point crossed the wake of one of the massive sea-dragon trawlers that prowled the global ocean for weeks on end. In the distance, they made out a tall structure erected on stilts: an oil derrick, probably owned by a Russian-Arab consortium, positioned just above a sea mount. Small, single-mast sailboats took advantage of the mild weather and fair winds, but only a couple; Venus was not a planet for pleasure boating, and amateur sailors were the kind who often vanished and were never seen again.

  By early afternoon, though, all other vessels had disappeared, and Aphrodite was the only boat on the ocean as far as the eye could see. Yet it wasn’t alone. The first of the vine islands had come into view, and the Water Folk were leading the boat straight to them.

  Ronson had never been a good student—he’d dropped out of college to join the NYPD, which in turn eventually led him to become a PI—but he remembered enough from his high-school science classes to recall the planet’s natural history. Billions of years ago, Venus had been Earth’s twin sister, and even similar enough to Mars to make the panspermia hypothesis a possible explanation for a shared genetic heritage among humans, the Martian shatan, and frogheads. At some point in the planet’s early eras, though, the Sun had raised the average global temperatures enough to cause a catastrophic greenhouse effect, which melted the polar ice caps and formed the permanent cloud layer with its incessant rain. Eventually the entire planet was flooded, its landmasses inundated before tectonic shifts could keep them above the rising waters.

  All that remained was a global ocean, yet beneath the watery surface were the old continents with their canyons and mountain ranges, like some vast Atlantis that would never again see the light of day. In some places, the ocean bottom lay only a dozen or so fathoms down, and it was here that underwater vegetation grew in abundance. One of the most common forms of marine plant life was a thick, ropy kind of seaweed that, once it grew large enough to become buoyant, tended to break free and float to the surface. Ocean currents gradually caused these weeds to clump together and form floating islands, some kilometers in length.

  Over countless millennia, life evolved on these drifting isles. The frogheads were one kind; the slickbark trees that were a harvestable source of everything from timber to pharmaceutical drugs to yaz were another. And once humans learned how to travel between planets, the people of Earth discovered that Venus was a world rich with resources just waiting to be exploited.

  Not everyone was happy about this.

  “We are raping this planet.” Mad Mikhail leaned against the starboard rail, watching the frogheads as they swam toward a vine island not much larger than a house. One of them had approached the boat and told Mikhail, in its croaking native tongue, that they needed a rest, so Angelo had grudgingly complied and dropped sea anchor near the next island they came upon. Now the Russian was in a reflective mood, breaking the pensive silence he’d maintained since leaving Veneragrad.

  “Rape?” Angelo sat beneath the tarp strung as a canopy across the aft deck, eating a sandwich he’d made in the galley. “Don’t talk about your sister that way … it’s not nice.”

  Mikhail ignored him, as did Ronson. The captain had an ugly sense of humor; Ronson had discovered this when he’d joined him for a while in the wheelhouse, only to have Angelo start telling him jokes that grew progressively more disgusting until he found an excuse to leave. “Why do you say that?” he asked, turning his back to the captain.

  “We come here,” Mikhail said, “and we take and we take and we take, but we give nothing back.” He nodded toward the frogheads; they lay prone upon the island’s matted weeds, vines, and moss, dozing in the midday heat. “They suffer the most. We steal their forest
s, pollute their water with oil, ruin their islands …”

  “And then they hang around Veneragrad so they can mooch candy bars from you.” Angelo shrugged. “Sounds like a fair trade to me.”

  “No. Not fair.” Mikhail cast a cold glare at him. “Chocolate for a world … not a fair trade at all.”

  “Yeah, well … look who got ’em hooked on it in the first place.” Noticing Ronson’s quizzical look, Angelo sneered. “You mean you don’t know? Chocolate is addictive to frogheads. Like cocaine, maybe even worse. Once they’ve had a taste, they gotta get more. And guess who got ’em started on it?”

  “You lie!” Mikhail’s face was red. “I was not the first to do this! One of my shipmates …”

  “O, sure. Maybe it wasn’t you, but you’re their number one pusher.” Angelo tossed the remnant of his sandwich overboard, wiped his hands against his shorts. “And if you’re not, then why don’t you toss over those candy bars you brung?”

  Mikhail looked away, avoiding the accusation Angelo had made. Ronson wondered if it was true. “One day, we will pay for what we have done here,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, well … you’re paying me for this trip and the day ain’t getting any shorter.” Angelo stood up from the barrel, headed for the wheelhouse. “Tell the froggies to rise and shine. I want to find this place and go home.”

  The captain didn’t get his wish. At the end of the day, the frogheads still hadn’t reached their destination, forcing Aphrodite to seek another island where it could anchor for the night. Again, the frogheads found a place to rest on its mossy, vine-covered banks.

  As darkness fell on the ocean, Angelo opened a locker on the aft deck and pulled out a large net. Ronson thought at first that he intended to go trawling, but instead Angelo told him and Mikhail to rig the net above the boat, from the wheelhouse roof to poles erected at the stern, until the deck was completely covered. Angelo then switched off the deck lamps, and once the three of them went below he closed the curtains in the cabin portholes.