Laramie was pulling the trigger over and over, to no effect. “Arming lever!” I said. “Cock it!”
“No!” the beast said. “No! Don’t cock!” Two spindly arms, like a tyrannosaurus, raised up. My last bullet took an arm off at the elbow.
It howled in pain. “I said No! Don’t! Don’t shoot. Me.”
A pink tentacle wormed out of the arm stump. It turned dark blue, curling, then flexed and became a new arm. “See?”
Laramie lowered her weapon. “Are you … talking to us?”
“Yes! Trying! Talk! To talk.”
I left my finger on the trigger but didn’t pull it. I looked at the beast over the pistol sights. “You can talk?”
“Yes! Not good!” The new arm had completely regrown. The creature studied it from a couple of angles. “Don’t do that again! That hurts!” It picked up the severed limb and sniffed it, and then swallowed it in two horrible bites.
“Taste,” it said. “A man should taste …” It shook its head violently. “A man should share, no.” It looked at its new hand. “Pain. Peril. A man should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being.” It opened its jaws wide, with a loud cracking sound, then sat back and cleared its throat.
“ ‘A man should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1884 Old Style. May 30.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“D-juh, d-joo, Julie. I know what Julie had. Has. In her brain.” It nodded slowly. “Had in her brain at the time that she joined me.”
“Because you ate her?” I said. “Ate her brain? Jesus!”
“No, no!” It shook its head violently, spraying tendrils of saliva. “Because … ‘because’ is hard. Itself.”
“Riddles,” I said, and tightened my grip on the gun.
“Wait,” Laramie said. “You mean ‘because,’ like, causality? That’s hard?”
“Yes.” The beast’s gaze swiveled to her. “Causality is not simple. I am her. When Julie died here, she became part of here. Part of Venus. And so part of me. She will always be.”
It looked back at me, huge blue eyes. “Everything. Every worm, every microorganism that ever died on Venus is part of Venus, forever. It’s different from Earth and Mars, I think.” I heard a step behind me, and turned.
It was Julie, my Julie. Naked, whole, unharmed. Next to her, Gloria. Also naked, leg completely healed.
“Dying is not the same here, darling,” Julie said, and shrugged. “Not so permanent.”
I fainted dead away.
—–—
The science of it is still not clear, to put it mildly. If it even is science.
The Venusian I tried to kill had “sort of” died dozens of times, in the centuries of life it remembered. For a Venusian to actually die, for keeps, it takes something catastrophic, like a fire. Otherwise, it will go through a rejuvenating process like the grisly transformation we had seen starting with Julie’s body. “Food for worms” doesn’t mean the same thing as on Earth.
There’s a lot that doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. Astronomy, biology, cosmology, just to start down the alphabet. If a planet can be sentient, what do you redefine? Planets or sentience? It has to be both, and everything.
It’s an existential headache, and not just existential.
The main thing Julie suffered was a profound career change, from explorer-scientist to laboratory animal. Or perhaps a new kind of explorer.
As far as researchers have found, all she lost was a portion of long-term memory. She could still do calculus and higher math, but had to relearn the multiplication tables and long division for them to work.
We spent many hours picking up where we had left off, on Farside a few years ago. At first I was helping her to reclaim her memory. Then we started making new memories of our own.
So now I’m living with a woman who is, I suppose, technically not human. That hasn’t stopped us from making a couple of copies.
So far they seem to work all right.
STEPHEN LEIGH
In the tense story that follows, a man who lost almost everything on Venus returns to the planet that had nearly cost him his life, and to the woman who had urged him on to destruction, to give them both another shot at finishing the job …
Stephen Leigh is the author of the Neweden series, which consists of Slow Fall to Dawn, Dance of the Hag, and A Quiet of Stone. He’s also the author of the Mictlan series, consisting of Dark Water’s Embrace and Speaking Stones, and has contributed six novels to the Ray Bradbury Presents series, some with John L. Miller, including Dinosaur World, Dinosaur Planet, Dinosaur Warriors, and Dinosaur Conquest. His stand-alone novels include The Bones of God, The Crystal Memory, The Woods, and The Abraxas Marvel Circus; he has also contributed to the Wild Cards series and the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City series, and has written as S. L. Farrell and Matthew Farrell. His short stories have been collected in A Rain of Pebbles and A Tapestry of Twelve Tales. His most recent novel is Assassins’ Dawn, a book in the Neweden series. Leigh lives with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Bones of Air, Bones of Stone
STEPHEN LEIGH
TAKE A SMALL ROCK, TOSS IT INTO A ROTATING CYLINDER, AND pour in abrasives. Tumble the mess for several days, while the grit gnaws at the hard edges and scrubs the rounding surfaces. What eventually emerges from the harsh chrysalis of the tumbler is rock subdued and transformed, shimmering and polished like molten glass, all the hidden colors and veins revealed …
Somewhere in my early teens, my parents gave me a rock-polishing kit. I went pretty quickly through the provided assortment of pebbles, pleased with what came from my growling, slow cylinder but bored with the tedious, long hours needed for the result. Like most kids that age, I preferred instant gratification. I would almost certainly have set the polishing kit aside like every other hobby of the month I’d owned, except that my grandmother, Evako, came up to my room one evening not long after.
“Here, Tomio,” she said, handing me a drab, ordinary piece of dark rock. “Run this through your noisy machine for me.”
“Sure,” I said—we were all used to the brusque demands of the Norkohn Shuttles matriarch, just as she was used to obedience. I tossed the rock up and down in my hand. It was nothing I’d have chosen: a chunk of undistinguished granite. “Why don’t you get some opal from the gardener, Obaasan,” I suggested, not wanting her to be disappointed with what I was certain would be mediocre results. “It’d look a lot better.”
She sniffed, taking the rock back from me and holding it in her fingers. I remember that her fingers were thin and wrinkled already, with knuckles swollen and large with arthritis that would only worsen as the years went on. “Obviously you don’t know what this is,” she told me.
“It’s granite,” I told her. “And it’s about as common as dirt.”
She shook her head at me. “This is Akiko. My obaasan.”
I could feel my brow wrinkling. “I don’t understand, Obaasan.”
“So I see.” Obaasan Evako sighed and sat on my bed, twirling the rock in the afternoon sun coming through the window. “Akiko had a wonderful garden in our villa in Chincha Alta. I grew up there, and that’s where I always came back to visit her. On my last visit, just before she died, I took this stone from the garden—not an important stone, not any different from a thousand others there. Yet … every time I look at it, I can see Akiko again, and that garden. As long as the rock lasts, so will that image in my mind.” She had been speaking more to the sunlight and the rock than to me; now she turned and fixed her gaze on me, as sharp as the flaked edges of the rock. “How can this rock be less than beautiful, with the truth and memories it holds?”