“You need medical help,” Colt said. “Lucille Town is three days away, by my estimate.”
“What difference does it make?” Sharol said. “We lost.”
Colt shrugged. “We are still alive,” he answered.
At the top of the next hill they stopped and rested. They had a view over the jungle and the river, and in the distance they could see the swamp and the ruined temple. The Roog’s head was lost in the clouds now. Soon he would be visible from space.
“No wonder the Atlanteans died out,” Sharol said.
“Yes,” Colt said.
He smiled, a private smile. “Look,” he said.
They saw it before they heard it. The sound traveled slower than the light, so that, when they saw it, it was in total silence.
It was hard to say, afterward, exactly what it was they saw.
Certainly, there was a flash of terrible brightness.
The Roog’s legs seemed to give way under him, suddenly.
It was the brightness of the sun, turning everything white. And then the Roog was no longer there. Sound followed, a rolling thunder, traveling for miles. The light dimmed, only slightly. The flames rose upward, smoke erupting in a vast towering mushroom cloud. Make no mistake, humanity has conquered space before; and out of that prehistory there came to us the ancient myths of the phoenix, resurrected in fire from ash, for such a creature could never have evolved on Earth.
It seemed to Colt afterward that before the cloud dispersed he saw a brightness, as beautiful as a bird, born out of the flames, rise and take off, into the air. The Sun Eater, being reborn in flame, like the phoenix.
They sat on the hilltop and watched the sun rise over the Venusian skies.
11.
IN THE DISTANCE, FAINT AND FADING, A FINAL WHISPER IN their minds.
Roog…
Then silence.
12.
COLT WAS PLAYING VENUSIAN HI-LO AND WINNING WHEN SHAROL came into the bar. He was limping, holding on to a crutch, but he was smiling all the same. Colt smiled back.
They had traveled through swampland and jungle to Lucille Town, under the shadow of the volcanoes. Neither was in good shape when they finally made it. But they had made it. That was the important thing.
The city prospered. A lumberyard was operating at one end of the town, and the men were busy clearing away the trees. The houses were slowly being converted into permanent structures, surrounded by clean, white picket fences. A new road was being built, linking the settlement to Port Smith. Everything seemed orderly, prosperous, and safe.
One day, Colt thought, all of Venus would be like this. The colonists would drain the swamps, chop down the forests, build roads and towns all over the planet. Such a world would have no room in it for Dwellers or Sun Eaters, the old temples would become roadside attractions, the old gods would die—and such a world would have no place in it for a man like Colt.
One day, Colt thought. But not today.
“Got room for one more?” Sharol asked. Colt moved his chair and the man beside him, a gruff marine, did the same. Sharol pulled over a chair and sat down. He put his hand, briefly, on Colt’s.
“Deal me in,” he said.
PAUL McAULEY
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.
McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and the revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Space Opera, as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence—a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set 10 million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars—Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent books are a new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, a major retrospective collection, A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985–2011, and a new novel, Evening’s Empires.
Here he takes us to a remote mining station on the rugged coast of Venus’s mysterious, fog-shrouded equatorial continent, where the well-armed miners are on guard for an attack by monsters—for all the good it will do them.
Planet of Fear
PAUL McAULEY
ACROSS THE GLISTENING SLICK OF THE SUBTROPICAL SARGASSO, amongst shoals and archipelagos of bladderweed, several thousand sunfish floated in intersecting circles of churning foam. They were big, the sunfish, big humped discs ten or fifteen or even twenty meters across, patched with clusters of barnacles and thatched with purple-brown thickets of strapweed and whipweed, and all around them soldier remoras flailed and fought, flashing and writhing in frothing, blood-blackened water. A quadrocopter drone hung high above this shambles like a lonely seabird, avid camera eyes transmitting images to the ekranoplan anchored several kilometers beyond the sargasso’s southern edge.
In the close warmth of the fire-control bay, bathed in the radiance of three big flatscreens, Katya Ignatova asked the petty officer piloting the drone to lock its cameras on a particular pair of sunfish. They were matched in size, each about twelve meters in diameter, and the fringes of their feeding tentacles had interlaced and fused and were now contracting, drawing them together. Dead and dying soldier remoras bobbed around them: slim, silvery torpedoes with chunks torn out of their flanks, shovel jaws gaping, eye clusters filmed white. Venusian fish were armored in bony chain mail, had external gills and horizontal tail fins resembling whale flukes, but they possessed swim bladders. Like terrestrial fish, their corpses floated.
The drone pilot said, “Such fury. Such waste.”
“Soldiers attack everything that gets too close to their sibling,” Katya said. “Including other sunfish. They can’t mate until their soldiers have been neutralized. But the dead aren’t wasted. Their flesh feeds the ecosystem where the next generation develops.”
She hunched forward as the pair of sunfish began to jab at each other with the spears of their spermatophores, and asked the drone pilot if he could get a close-up of the action.
“No problem,” he said, and made delicate adjustments to the joystick that controlled his little craft.
The views on the screens tilted and shifted, stabilized again. Katya prompted the pilot to zoom in on the tip of a calcified spear that scratched amongst drifts of purple-brown weed before abruptly driving forward.
“I believe they call that the money shot,” the pilot, Arkadi Sarantsev, said.