The other diners were openly staring at them, and not, for once, because they were the only two women in the room. Katya wore the shirt and cargo pants in which she’d been released; her mother wore a severely cut white suit that emphasized her slim figure, and her trademark, red-framed glasses.
“You weren’t wrong, dear,” she said. “The men had been infected by something that drove them mad.”
“But it wasn’t a bug or a parasite. And it didn’t have anything to do with the pigs. And we have only circumstantial evidence that it had anything to do with the fish.”
It had taken several weeks of tests in the naval hospital to determine that the miners had been infected by a kind of prion: an infectious agent that closely resembled a misfolded version of a protein found in neurons in the amygdala, the small subcortical structure in the brain that regulated both fear and pleasure responses. The prion catalyzed the misfolding of those proteins, creating an imbalance of neurotransmitters and triggering an exaggerated version of the fight-or-flight reaction and release of massive amounts of adrenaline and other hormones. The psychotic breaks and hallucinations suffered by the miners had been attempts to rationalize uncontrollable emotional thunderstorms.
Katya wanted very much to prove that the prion had been present in the blood of the fish which had beached themselves. As for the pigs, they had been infected by a parasitic threadworm, but it had only affected their respiratory systems and did not seem to be transmissible to humans. She had been right in thinking that the miners’ madness was due to an infection, but had gotten every detail wrong because she had based her ideas on terrestrial examples. She had made the mistake of arguing from analogy, of trying to map stories from Earth on the actuality of Venus, and the fit had been imperfect.
“I saw two different things,” she told her mother, “and tried to make them part of the same story. Captain Chernov was right about that, at least.”
“He was wrong about everything else. And you are too hard on yourself,” her mother said fondly.
“I wonder where I got that from?”
“Can the poor men you rescued be cured?”
“They’re under heavy sedation and undergoing cognitive therapy. They’re no longer scared to death, but purging the prions from their brains won’t be easy.”
“It sounds as if you have found a new project.”
“I’m wondering if it’s a general problem,” Katya said. “This particular prion caused a gross behavioral change, but there may be others that have more subtle effects. We think that we are separate from the biosphere of Venus, yet it is clear that we are not. All of us, Russians, Americans, British, we have more in common with each other than with the people from our homelands. We came from Earth, but we are all Venusians now. Venus is in our blood, and our minds.”
“So you have a new research topic, and a new way of getting into trouble,” her mother said. “What about this new man of yours?”
“We’re taking it slowly. He forgave me, at least, for giving him a bad concussion and injuring his pride.”
Although Arkadi had said, the first time they had met in quarantine, that if he had been piloting the drone, he would have had no problem returning the favor.
“A man who puts love before pride,” her mother said. “Now there’s a lovely example of a new way of thinking.”
MATTHEW HUGHES
Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, but spent most of his adult life in Canada. He’s worked as a journalist, as a staff speechwriter for the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia before settling down to write fiction full-time. Clearly strongly influenced by Jack Vance, as an author Hughes has made his reputation detailing the adventures of rogues like Henghis Hapthorn, Guth Bandar, and Luff Imbry, who live in the era just before that of The Dying Earth, in a series of popular stories and novels that include Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, Hespira, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Quartet and Triptych, The Yellow Cabochon, The Other, and The Commons, with his stories being collected in The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. His most recent books are the novels in his Urban Fantasy Hell and Back trilogy, The Damned Busters and Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews.
In the deliciously sly tale that follows, he takes us to Venus, the Planet of Love, to show us that while Love might be an irresistible force, sometimes it’s a good idea to give resisting it your very best shot.
Greeves and the Evening Star
MATTHEW HUGHES
I THREW BACK THE COVERS AND SAT UP. “GREEVES,” I SAID, “I had the most bally awful dream.”
“I am sorry to hear it, sir.”
He handed me the morning cup and saucer and I took the sip without which the Gloster day cannot begin. The ordinary day, that is, in the common run of things, not the kind of day that follows a night of revelry and riot at the Inertia Club, when one awakes with the sense that death is not only imminent but cannot arrive soon enough.
“I dreamt that Baldie Spotts-Binkle had lured me onto Slithy Tove-Whippley’s homemade rocket ship, battened down the hatch, if battened’s the word I want …”
“It is, sir.”
“Right ho … and then we’d blasted off for Venus—not the statue, mind, but the evening star itself—and that we’d slept like that Winkle chap for months on end before pitching up at Baldie’s estate in the middle of the most dismal swamp imaginable.”
Greeves inclined his head in a manner I recognized as conveying sympathy. I plowed on, the dream as real to me as the vital oolong of which I now took a second, fortifying draught. “It was a place steeped in gloom where the sun never shows its face, all stagnant pools and sluggish streams, with only the occasional dab of what we might call solid earth.”
“Oh, dear, sir.”
“Ah well,” I said, motioning with my unencumbered hand to indicate that the unpleasant figments were fast dwindling in life’s rearview mirror. “Draw the curtains, will you, Greeves, and admit the smiles of rosy-fingered—”
“Sir, you must prepare yourself for a disagreeable prospect,” he said.
“Rain?” I hazarded a guess. “Stiff winds?”
“Not the winds,” he said, throwing aside the heavy cloths to reveal panes streaked with rivulets whose flows were perpetually interrupted by the impact of freshly arrived droplets the size of marbles.
I rose from the bed and went to the window. It can justly be said that while Bartholomew Gloster may occasionally be surprised, and now and then, when circumstances so conspire, even awestruck, it is rare that he is actually staggered.
Yet I was staggered by the view from the window. The cup and saucer fell unnoticed from a nerveless hand, though not unnoticed by the ever-vigilant Greeves, who deftly caught them without the spilling of a drop.
“I say, Greeves,” I said, “I mean to say.” Though what I meant to say, I did not know. It was scarcely a moment for the mot juste.
“Indeed, sir.”
As far as the eye could stretch, whatever wasn’t gray was green, and whatever wasn’t green was gray. Even so, every green was well tinged by the gray. And all was being relentlessly battered from above by unending bucketloads of rain.