Old Venus

Her tail, he thought, should be lashing. He’d have liked to see that. He retreated, replaced the headset where he’d found it, and lay down again: his thoughts racing.

Feigning sleep, he must have dozed. He woke when he heard something crawling.

The globes were still dim, the screens had been dismantled. Sekool sat by the firebowl, tail around her feet. Nothing moved, but the sound of crawling was closer. Puzzled, Forrest turned on his side, as if in sleep, and saw something come through the wall of the room.

It crossed the floor. A male human figure, slender and juvenile, naked and very battered, hauling himself along on one hand and one knee, back, ribs, and shoulders marked with livid weals. Bruises blotted out his eyes. No sign of a tail, which made Forrest think he was asleep and dreaming of a human boy except that the whole thing was too complete, too coherent. The kid’s hair was dark, his greenish skin unnaturally pale—until he reached the firelight. Then he was more than pale: he was translucent, transparent.

A mangled corpse, but moving, the apparition crept into Sekool’s arms.

Another hologram? Not the way Sekool responded. Not the way she held the kid, rocked him and murmured to him, stroking his shadow-hair from his swollen, battered shadow-brow, then somehow Forrest made a sound.

She looked up: instantly, the ghost was gone.

“What was that?” he breathed.

Enormous eyes unblinking, she calmly left the fire and picked up the “translation device.”

“My son, Gemin. He comes to me when it’s quiet. Usually I’m alone; you’ve never woken before. He died under torture. Don’t die under torture, Johnforrest. It’s not a good way to go.”

She removed the headset and turned away; the subject was closed. Forrest got up and joined her by the firebowl, collecting the headset on the way. He held her gaze, deliberately settling the flexible web around his skull.

“Tell me, Sekool.”

She looked into the flames, drawing her tail more closely around her.

“There’s not much to tell. He was caught up in the secret war and taken hostage; we failed to negotiate his release. He was mistreated, our protests achieved nothing; we learned that he’d died. There’s nothing to be done. I only comfort him, and quiet him as best I can … Death is not the end, Johnforrest, as we all know, because our dead return. They speak to us and know us, in dream and in the waking world. But when they depart at last, we don’t know what happens next. We don’t know if the unquiet ones, trapped in the way they died, escape from suffering at last. It’s cruel.”

“I know you’re a shaman,” he said. “There must be something you can do.”

Her long fingers closed on the bag of bones.

“No. Let’s say no more about it. I can’t help my boy. He’ll fade, that’s all, and he’ll be gone, and I won’t know where.”

2. OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE FIRE

ON THEIR WAY OUT, SEKOOL HAD TO PLACATE THE DEMONS again. Forrest kept his distance and didn’t stir until she’d made her circuit. She seemed self-conscious, something he’d never seen in her before, and he liked it. He had no doubt that, if he’d asked, she’d tell him that of course she’d planned to disarm the venom-spitting fence, if she’d been leaving him behind (to await those kinsnippers!). He said nothing. He just followed her, as before, grinning to himself: no longer helpless baggage. In charge of his own destiny again, and it felt good.

But surely, subtly, everything had changed? Had the trees actually moved? Surely the spaces between the ranks were different, the uncertain ground had new contours—

“Happens all the time,” said Sekool, catching his bewildered glances. “The sek is a single organism: it shifts about as it pleases. That’s why there are no trails. The indigenes have their own ways to get around. We use our beacons, and come in on foot. It’s simpler.”

“What a world. It’s like a circle in Dante’s hell.”

“Indeed. All death in life is here, eating its own tail. Yet somehow I love it.”

—–—

There was a wind blowing outside the wood, they could hear it. Sekool gave Forrest a robe like her own: he wrapped himself, the folds settling firmly round his head and face, and they emerged from tepid stillness into a dust storm. Well protected but half-blind, he felt a hard surface under the skidding grit and glimpsed big squared and domed shapes. Fighting the wind to look behind him, he saw the sek: rising like a grey-green mirage, on the edge of a desert-devoured town. She headed for an intact building and used a touch pad to open massive double doors. In a covered courtyard, a welcome silence, she bared her face—

“I have a call to make. It won’t take long.”

The room they entered made Forrest think of a chapeclass="underline" a podium for the minister, benches for the congregation. Images of lizard-people, animal, and vegetable flourishes, in colored metals or enamel, covered the walls. She approached the podium, Forrest took a seat. His legs were too long. Sekool was tall, but like a Japanese woman, her height was in her pliant body … Expecting a videolink, he saw, to his astonishment, powdery matter begin to whirl inside a clear cylinder: building something from the platter upward. The cylinder withdrew, and there stood a solid, masculine-seeming human figure, Venusian style: a Lizard Man. Not the guy Forrest had seen in the mirror-screen: someone new. He had scanty head hair, he wore some kind of dress uniform; he seemed authoritative but old; or maybe sick.

Sekool spoke, Lizard Man mainly listened. At one point, he looked over her shoulder, and Forrest, disconcerted, felt eyes on him: a presence in the instant simulacrum. Finally, Sekool bowed, the old guy did the same. The body crumbled and vanished.

She walked past Forrest, resuming her headset as she headed for the doors.

“Who was that?”

“My husband. Excuse him if he seemed rude, you’ll meet him properly up above. Do you have wives, Johnforrest?”

“I’ve had two. Then I gave up.”

“Wise man … I did what was expected of me. I gave a powerful old man my baby’s name, his futurity for our security. A fair trade on both sides: we didn’t expect it would be forever. I have no complaints, none at all. But oh, he’s a long time dying!”

She flashed him that eerie smile. “Now we need to hurry. The wind usually eases at nightfall, but I want to be far from here by then.”

In the covered yard, Sekool left him, and swiftly reappeared, leading an extraordinary animaclass="underline" a low-slung, big-haunched, tan-hided, wrinkly camel, with bulbous cat’s-eyes, a sinuous neck and tail, a muzzle thick with stiff, drooping whiskers—

“Johnforrest, meet Mihanhouk. I don’t take him into the sek, but we need him now. You’ll have to ride behind me, I’m afraid. I wasn’t expecting to bring home a guest.”

Who had harnessed Mihanhouk? He listened. Not a footstep, not a voice.

“Are we alone? Where is everybody?”

“Only the indigenes live permanently on the surface, and around here they don’t leave the haunted woods. Let’s go, it’s a long ride to the Sea Mount Station.”

If anybody asks, he thought, the ground staff never saw me—

The cat-camel’s paces were challenging. He loped like a hare, pushing off from his big haunches, landing with an insouciant bounce on his forepaws. So far, so uncomfortable, then he put on speed. At every leap, Forrest (with muttered curses) nearly lost his seat; at every touchdown, his tailbone tried to send his cervical vertebrae through the top of his head. Sek