It ignored what I said entirely. Staring at me, it said, “You didn’t care if you saw the Lights-in-Water or the bones at the bottom of the Great Darkness? That’s what I want, more than anything. That’s why I pushed the Green Council to let Avariel come back. She said she would tell me what she saw in the Great Darkness, what my body will never experience with bones-of-air.”
“Bones-of-air,” I mused. “That’s all I have, now.”
I meant it as a joke. Hasalalo’s hissing was louder this time, more emphatic, and its voice had a timbre I’d rarely heard in shreeliala before. “I thought you would understand,” it said, though I wasn’t sure if that was agreement, sarcasm, or denial. “Have you seen the Pit, where those of us with bones-of-air go?”
I hadn’t, though sitting with Hasalalo, I wondered why. I knew about the Pit, the cauldron at the top of Blackstone Mountain, but Avariel had only glanced at the Blackstone’s paltry heights—no challenge to someone with her athletic ability—and shrugged. She’d had no interest in a walk to the heights, only in her descent to where no human had gone before, so therefore I had expressed no interest either. But that seemed too much to explain to Hasalalo, so I only shook my head.
It burbled some more, and, pushing away its chair, rose to its feet: twin scaled, long flippers with webbing extending down between the legs past the knobs of knees, far more suited to water than to land. On the land, shreeliala waddled rather than walked. “Come,” it said, and gestured. I rose from my own seat.
“It’s a long walk to the Pit,” I told it, “and on the steep side.” I gestured at the space where my legs should have been. “Do you think …?”
It stared at me with huge eyes that blinked wetly. From the tank on its back, a nozzle hissed and sprayed thick, gelid water over the shreeliala. “Come,” it said again. The command in its voice reminded me of the way Obaasan Evako spoke.
I came, calling to the bartender that I’d be back for that Scotch later. She grimaced, clearly annoyed, though whether it was with me or Hasalalo or both of us, I couldn’t tell. She shook her head as we left.
I shouldn’t have worried about the walk. As we left the bar, an open-topped scooter hurried quickly over through the rain from somewhere farther down the street, driven by another shreeliala, illuminated by flashes of lightning and accompanied by thunder. Hasalalo entered the small cab behind the driver, then gestured to me. “Come,” it said again. As I slid into the seat alongside it, Hasalalo leaned forward and said something to the driver in English: the shreeliala never spoke anything but English while on land. The driver nodded; the scooter whined and complained as it made its way away from the harbor. We moved back up Blackstone’s single road toward the plateau on which the port sat, and beyond it—now along an unpaved, potholed trail—toward the caldera that sat near Blackstone’s summit. The hot spot in the crust that had created both Blackstone and the Great Darkness had moved on millennia ago and was undoubtedly building up a new island somewhere to the northwest. Once, this place would have been a steaming, hissing hell where the eternal rain hammered at sputtering lava flows. No more; the volcano of Blackstone was long dormant and cold. The driver stopped near the rim of the crumbling crater, and we got out into a driving rain, with lightning crackling around us. I’d thumbed on my rainshield as soon as we’d left the bar; Hasalalo seemed to relish the wetness.
Here, on the highest mountain that Venus had to offer, modest as it was, I could look out at the unbroken sweep of the Always Sea—at least to what the storm allowed me to see. I thought that, out past Blackstone Bay, where the long ocean swells started, I could glimpse a darker green-blue against the lighter gray-green: the Great Darkness.
I could smell the caldera long before I could see it. We made our way slowly over the broken, eroded volcanic rock to where we could look down, and I wished that the rainshield could keep out odors as well as rain.
The caldera stank of rotting flesh. Shreeliala bodies, in various stages of decomposition, were scattered down the sides of the caldera in front of us, some of them half-draped over the slope just in front of us, as if they’d been tossed aside like so much unwanted trash. The floor of the crater was littered with their bones, flashing white in the erratic lightning flashes. Wrigglers—the blue-green, maggotlike worms that were one of Venus’s few land creatures—fed on the decaying matter. I gagged at the smell of rotting flesh and had to fight to keep my last meal in my stomach.
Hasalalo was staring down with me, though I couldn’t read the expression on its face to see if it matched the horror on mine. I looked more closely at the closest skeletons to us. Nested in the bones, I saw small clusters of rounded pebbles, rocks unlike any of the volcanic variety on Blackstone. Little groups of them were plentiful, almost as plentiful as the bones. I crouched down to look more closely: the stones were smoothed on their ridges though the rest of the rock was rough, as if they’d already been in a tumbler for a few hours. I glanced at Hasalalo and pointed to the nearest pile: four or five of the stones caged under the curve of a shreeliala’s ribs. “May I …?” I asked Hasalalo, who gave me an almost perfect human shrug. I hoped it meant the same thing and reached down for one of the stones, carefully trying to avoid touching the bones that enclosed it. I managed to fish one out between two fingers and stood up, looking at it closely. In my hand, rain no longer varnished its surface; it dried quickly almost as if the stone was absorbing the water. The stone was reddish, with light gray veins marbling it; the higher surfaces were almost polished, the lower ones still had lots of surface irregularities. I turned it in my fingers, looking at the black, glassy highlights and wondering how it would look after I ran it through my tumbler. Blackstone Mountain. The Pit. Venus. “Can I keep this?” I asked Hasalalo.
Its bubbler hissed. Hasalalo was watching me. Its underlids slid over its eyes and remained there as the rain started to pelt down harder: no longer a sheeter, but now what the locals called a “pounder.” “Why?” it asked.
I reached into my pocket with my free hand and pulled out my little collection of polished rocks, displaying them to Hasalalo in my palm. “It’s amazing what a rock looks like when you polish it like this. They become little jewels: the essence of the stone. Or maybe it’s the truth inside the stone. It’s something I do, everywhere I go. See, this one: it’s a rock I took from the beach the last time I was here.” Blue-black glass, so finely polished that you could see the darker imperfections floating inside like planets nested in a dark nebula.
Hasalo leaned over my hand and stretched out a web-snaggled finger to touch it. “This is one of the black stones?”
I nodded. “Pretty, isn’t it? I’d like to do the same with this stone from the pit, just to see how it comes out, to see what beauty it’s hiding.”
“Do you know what you hold?”
I shook my head.
A hiss from the bubbler. “You know what happens to those of bones-of-stone when they die?”
“Yes. You release the bodies over the Great Darkness. There’s something about reincarnation for a few, and, well, your gods … umm, the Lights-in-Water are down there and, uh …” My voice trailed off. The truth was that while I knew the shreeliala had a complex mythology that revolved around the Great Darkness, all that Avariel had cared about was that no human had ever been all the way to the bottom of the Great Darkness and that she’d be the first. Therefore, that was all I cared about, too. Just as I hadn’t bothered to learn how the shreeliala reproduced, I’d also ignored their beliefs. I figured the way they dealt with death was like our own tales of death and afterlife: ancient myth and fantasy, with none of it real.