“They need the right kind of leader,” Heston said.
I put a hand out to him. “I wish you luck.”
Heston hissed. No doubt disgusted with me and thinking me a coward, he ignored my hand and left as he saw Maet’s silhouette coming toward us.
Was I a coward? I could hardly sleep that night, bile in the back of my mouth.
In the early gray light of dawn, I woke to Heston’s screams. I remembered the sound of a cat that had been caught by a hunting dog one of my neighbors had penned up when I was a kid, and it was something like that. A high-pitched mewling that didn’t stop, it snapped me out of my dreams about blue skies and no clouds.
Heston was in the courtyard, his hands and feet bound to a pole set into a notched hole in one of the flagstones.
Venusians didn’t use whips. They hung pink-and-snow-feathered leeches from Heston’s chest and back. As I got close I could hear a loud sucking crunch, and Heston screamed again.
When the creature was finished, one of the overseers pulled it away, leaving a deep and ragged hole that streamed blood and black ichor. It smelled of licorice and rot.
Venusians streamed past, darting sidelong glances as I moved to stand in front of Heston. He looked up at me through a haze of pain. “Charles …”
“Who betrayed you?” I asked sadly.
Heston coughed. “Thought it was you, at first. But it was a Venusian. Telkket. From one of the southern marshes. He stood here and announced to everyone what I’d done. Why? Why would someone do that?”
“The same reason it’s always been done,” I said, fiddling with my bracelet. “Even if your uprising had succeeded, most of our fellow workers in the common house stood a chance of dying from the repercussions. A slaver society reacts strongly to uprisings, they’d know that. By ratting you out, he’s guaranteed a small improvement in his life. Most people go for the bird in the hand.”
Heston began to cry. “They’re going to drag this out. They’re going to kill me.”
“Or not,” I said. “A living, crippled and broken slave is a good example to have as well.”
“Oh God.” That last was a faint whimper.
I thought for a long second, then continued. “You probably suspected this, given the things I’ve said. But some of my ancestors were slaves. My great-grandfather, he fought. Like you. Was whipped. Hobbled. Scarred by brands. But one day, after fighting so long, he up and cut his own throat rather than continue living under the whip. Not something I figured you’d appreciate before this morning, but something I’ve been thinking on ever since we were captured.”
Heston looked up at me with lost eyes.
I cracked my wristband and removed the cyanide pill inside. “I know you didn’t have time to use yours,” I said. “Maybe they won’t kill you. Maybe they’ll keep hurting you. I don’t know. But I want to give you this. Just in case.”
I placed the pill on his tongue, like a priest giving someone a Communion wafer.
“Thank you,” he hissed.
One of the overseers struck me, yelling at me to move on. I left as they were putting the leeches back on. This time they ate at his ankles, and Heston sagged at the pole as his feet failed.
By sunset he was dead, mouth foaming from the cyanide pill.
5.
“I’M PREGNANT,” MAET TOLD ME ONE MORNING AS WE LINED UP for the fields.
The look on my face unnerved her. She squeezed my hand. “Don’t be so sad, Charles of Earth.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Didn’t know what?” Maet asked.
“That we could even have a child.” She was Venusian. But we all were humanoid, as Eric had noted in our first days trapped together. He had talked about common evolution, or panspermia. Or even more fanciful reasons why the human form existed here.
And then the real horror of it all struck me. “What life will my child grow into?” I asked. I thought about myself at four, free and playing in the grass, ignoring my mother’s call to come inside. I tried to imagine bringing my own child along to the fields to unload the ships. Seeing my child whipped and broken.
“There are many here who are generations old,” Maet said. “We will adapt. All adapt.” But there was a note of sadness and resignation in her voice.
I could hardly see the ground in front of me for days.
My world revolved around the stone street out to the field where the airships landed. I could count the stones on the walk to and from the common house with my eyes closed, half-asleep in the early morning shamble out, and the tired shuffle back to what I’d come to regard as home.
My dreams, when I was rested enough to dream now, turned from trying to remember what blue skies looked like to dreaming of flying. It took me a long while to understand what my subconscious mind had decided, as I had slipped into a dark place while thinking about bringing a child into this world.
But one day, watching the silvered airship approach and drop its single bowline, I knew how I would leave: I wouldn’t run, I would fly.
I’d been walking in and out of the cabins of these ships for so long. I knew the layout, and although I couldn’t read Venusian, I had some sense of the controls. I had been a pilot in the war, after all.
The Venusian airship designs were better than the old Nazi ones we’d seen in newsreels. The Venusians compressed the helium inside into tanks, letting the airships glide down onto the ground and unload cargo without shooting up into the air. The bowline was a formality, probably a holdover from when they’d been more like the airships on Earth and always lighter than air.
It took just a few minutes to pump the helium back into the airship’s envelope. That, I thought, would be the trickiest segment of my plan.
But I wouldn’t be able to fly it alone.
The longest stretch of work came as I worked to convince the overseers to bring Shepard and Eric over to our estate, promising them that the three of us would work harder despite the nightly beatings we would surely suffer for rising above the pack.
That took working extra hard. To get noticed by the overseers so I could sell them on the idea. And that meant barely sleeping in a corner with a small piece of metal I’d rubbed into a sharp blade against a stone edge to protect Maet, my unborn child, and myself.
When the lord approved the purchase, and the overseers shoved a very thin Eric into the common room, I barely recognized him. Emaciated, his hair unkempt, he collapsed by my blanket and slept.
“It was hellish,” Shepard told me as I kept watch with my blade. “They were working us to death building a seawall for real ships. Knee deep in the water, moving rocks however we could. Bit by bit. I kept telling them I was an engineer. We could do better with machines, and they beat me every time. I learned to shut up pretty quick.”
“It is better here,” I told him. And Shepard began to weep silently and thank me for getting them moved. They were not surprised by Maet, or to find that she was pregnant. Eric shrugged, and wasn’t even fascinated by the fact.
How quickly our priorities could change! From heroes of a nation to weeping about being moved to a less servile state.
I told them about Commander James, and Shepard nodded. “They took our bracelets away and sold them as trinkets to the children. Sometimes I would lie awake hoping one of them ate the pill, and other times I hated myself for thinking it.”
“I understand,” I said. “Now get some sleep.”
I watched over them that first night in the dark like a feral mother cat, until Shepard woke up and spelled me. In the days that followed, we set watch each night and got enough sleep to survive.
I waited for Eric to get his strength back before I began whispering my own plan to them. They blanched at first, thinking about Commander James’s fate. “This is not a revolt, this is running off into the bush. There were a lot of people who managed it and built lives for themselves.” I thought of the runaways who had lived in the mountains of Jamaica that my father would tell tall tales about.