Old Venus

“Don’t worry,” she said. She’d kept the headset on since his shower-bath, a concession he appreciated. “They’re just eating air. It doesn’t know we’re here.”

They reentered the woods, and almost at once she halted, gesturing for him to step well back. A knotted growth, a tumor on a root, stood knee high in their path. Sekool crouched, her tail balancing her, and cut herself between the fingers of her right hand with the knife he’d borrowed. Was her blood red? He couldn’t tell in this everlasting rosy-green twilight—

“Wait. Don’t move from where you stand.”

Following her with his eyes, he saw the same ceremony performed again, farther into the trees on his right. What was she doing? Placating demons? Having met some of the demons, he didn’t move a muscle until she reappeared from the left. She’d circled round something big. They walked on and stood in the precinct of a truly vast dead giant: a tree stump tall as a house and broad as a barn. Forrest looked it over with respect.

“I hope this guy doesn’t feed on flesh.”

“Actually he does, but the heartwood is inert.”

The last section of the entrance tunnel was vertical. They descended a ladder into a room rounded and domed like the first cave, but far more spacious and better furnished. There were covered couches, low tables, domed chests, a firebowl at one focus of the ellipse, a wellspring bubbling at the other. Doorways (closed off) seemed to lead to other areas.

Forrest’s appetite had returned. He longed for steak, fries, and a good malt, but he made do with another sappy-gruel gourd (he should stop calling them “gourds,” since they were obviously manufactured), fell onto a couch, and plunged into oblivion.

In his dreams, the snouted things chased him, limbless bodies covered in worms. The hyenas circled under the venom tree, shaggy with their freight of bloodsuckers. The tiny worms that filled the sek’s air, and had invaded his pores, had smaller worms to bite them. He woke with a shuddering start. Nibblers, sippers: cute names for unappeasable horrors. Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together … Parasites are everywhere, far too many of the bastards on Earth, but if Sekool hadn’t found him, what an appalling fate! But she didn’t find me, he thought. She was watching me. “Your fall saved your life, but at a cost—”

He opened his eyes. She was beside him, in her tripod pose: wearing the headset. She smiled at him. He’d come to like that eerie, too-wide smile very much. But it had an edge to it, on which he feared to cut himself.

“I must return your gear.”

She handed over everything, including the pellet gun, which he’d assumed was lost or confiscated. “That is not a lethal weapon,” she remarked. “You carried none. What if you’d run into trouble, Johnforrest?”

What kind of trouble, he wondered. Friends of yours? “What if I did? Thou shalt not kill. I’m on a fact-finding mission, I’m not at war with anyone.”

“A fact-finding mission,” she repeated. “Indeed. I see.”

“What about you, Sekool? I’m deeply in your debt, of course, but what are you doing in this hellhole? How did you happen to turn up like that?”

“The surface is a source of raw materials, Johnforrest. We come here to make deals with the indigenes and squabble with each other over the spoils. I was researching tree venoms that can be weaponized, if you must know.”

“That’s no work for a doctor.”

“We live in the dark as well as the bright, Mr. From-the-Sky, and though I chose medicine, I was born to something else. I saw you run from the vermin, I saw you climb, then fall, it was pure chance.”

Now I know too much, thought Forrest. And whatever the hell’s going on, I get the feeling I’m in serious trouble. But you’d spare me if you could, for which I thank you—

He said nothing, just nodded gravely.

“I’ll be leaving soon,” she said. “Here you have everything you need, and no sippers or nibblers can reach you: the hollows under the great hearts are our safe houses. I’ll give you a homing beacon, since you have none, to guide you back to the spot where I found you. But you were very ill. Please wait: eat, rest, and exercise awhile before leaving. I’m not happy about the way you keep falling asleep in the daytime—”

“Oh, that? We call it jet lag. It’s nothing, it’s just taking me a while to adjust to a different time zone—”

Forrest liked to wear a wristwatch; he collected them. Before leaving for West Africa he’d had one specially made for this trip. An ingenious, expensive toy; instead of hours and seconds, it followed the intricate dance of the orbits of the two planets. Sekool had returned this device. He didn’t think she could have tampered with it. As he spoke he read the time, the only time that mattered to him, and his heart skipped a beat.

He wanted to ask her just how long was I “very ill”? How long is your world’s “day,” right now? He had no idea how to frame the question, and it didn’t matter. He knew enough of PoTolo’s complex requirements to be sure he’d missed his window. His next chance wouldn’t be coming around for … for quite a while.

“But Johnforrest, I have a proposal. It suddenly struck me. Why not come to the clouds? You’re on a fact-finding mission: I could introduce you to interesting people, and later we could surely set you down wherever you need to be.”

Forrest slipped the orrery watch into an inside pocket. Her big green eyes were limpid with lies, her smile had that bleak, warning edge, and he didn’t care.

“What a wonderful idea, I’d be delighted. When do we leave?”

If he was stranded, for a year and a half or forever, he might as well see the world. Stir things up, in this story he didn’t understand. Why not? If Lizard Woman feared for his life, maybe she just didn’t know John Forrest very well! But that pouch on the cord around her neck, where she kept her oracle bones, what was going on there—?

She was making arrangements for his visit: Forrest had “fallen asleep in the daytime” again. The room was dim, the lights that stood in wall niches were at their lowest setting. He heard Sekool’s voice, but she was nowhere in sight. She’d screened off an area at the end of the room, the way she used to screen his bed sometimes when he was sick. The headset lay on a table. Intrigued, he donned it and sneaked up to the screens, creeping around until he could peer between them. He saw himself, standing naked, quivering, full frontal.

The shock was momentary. He was looking as if into a full-length, freestanding mirror, but it was a mirror that didn’t reflect the room he was in. The naked figure was a hologram. A stranger, a Lizard Man (though he couldn’t see a tail) stood by the holo, dressed in black and white. Sekool, her back to Forrest, spoke rapidly in a language that crackled and fizzed like fireworks: but reached him as English (mostly)—

“No. He’s an original, not any kind of flishatatonaton. But he’s carrying an implant, attached to his stomach wall. I haven’t touched it, and I don’t know what it’s for—”

Good to know I’m still a walking interplanetary probe, thought Forrest. Lizard Man’s contribution, over the videolink, was incomprehensible.

“Deniable is good, but how long could it stand up? This is better. Far better than a … a kinsnipping, Esbwe! We want to avoid reprisals, don’t we?”