The sense of something approaching … then the pain, the terrible pain that sent me whirling into unconsciousness …
“Avariel,” I said, leaning over Patrick’s console, “be careful …”
“I don’t believe—” she began, but the lights rushed inward: too bright, too huge, and the camera view tumbled wildly as they heard Avariel cry out. “No! Don’t …”
Then the screens all went dark at once, the readouts went to flat-line, and there was only the hiss of static in the speakers. “Avariel!” I shouted, though I knew already that it was too late. “Avariel!”
Silence. I heard Mikhail cursing at his console. “I’m taking us down,” he said. “We’ll go and get her.”
“No!” That was Hasalalo, its voice shrill through the bubbler. “That is not permitted. The Green Council forbids it. I forbid it.”
“Fuck both you and the Green Council!” Mikhail ranted. “We have to do something. Patrick, give me her last position.”
I put my hand on Mikhail’s shoulder; he pushed it away. “You can’t,” I told him. Patrick hadn’t moved, staring at all of us. “Avariel knew the risks.”
“And last time, she brought you back,” Mikhail answered.
“Not all of me,” I answered. “Some of me is still down there. She knew the risks,” I repeated. He stared at me. He cursed again, punching a closed fist on the console. A screen sparked in static at the punishment. Then he let his hands drop to his side.
We waited, hovering above the Great Darkness, until an hour after her air should have run out. Then, in furious silence and grief, we headed back to Undersea Port.
I stood at the shore of the Always Sea. The rain was a bare drizzler, fat drops falling from scudding, gray-black clouds as the wind frothed the tips of the low rollers coming in. Lightning from a storm near the horizon licked bright tongues into the sea. I’d left the rainshield behind in my room; if Venus wanted me to get wet, I’d oblige her and allow it to happen. I imagined the gods of Venus spitting on me from the eternal cloud banks, and laughing when one of the droplets hit me. I stared out toward the Great Darkness, half-believing I could see the darkness of it even though I knew that was impossible.
Avariel’s body never came back up. I imagined her bones, down there with all the others. With a few of mine, as well.
I heard the scrape of a flippered foot on the rocks and the hiss of a bubbler behind me, and glanced over my shoulder to see Hasalalo there. It stood alongside me, silent except for the noise of the bubbler. “The Green Council has closed the Great Darkness to all further human exploration,” it said. “None of your kind will ever do what Avariel attempted.”
It was staring at me. I took a long breath, then plunged my hand into my pocket. I pulled out the stomach-stone I’d taken from the pit. It shone in the rain and the diffuse light from the eternally clouded sky: marbled blue highlights in a swirling, orange-red matrix—gorgeous, and oddly heavy. “Here,” I told it. “You wanted to see the truth hiding in the stone. Here it is.” I took its hand and put the finished piece on its scaled flesh, the polished surface glinting like a wet jewel.
Hasalalo’s bubbler burbled as it stared, prodding the stone with a webbed finger. Its huge eyes looked up. “There was great beauty inside,” it said. “How could the Lights-in-Water not love such a thing if they could see it, if someone gave it to them?”
I nodded. I thought it would keep the stone, but Hasalalo handed the stomach-stone back to me; I put it in my pocket to nestle with the other stones: Avariel. Venus. The last time …
Neither of us said anything for a time, just watching the rain-pocked rollers coming in off the Always Sea. “You’ll be leaving,” Hasalalo said finally.
I shook my head. “No,” I told it. “I think I’ll stay here for a while. Maybe you were right about seeing truth. I’ve always moved around. For once, I think I’ll try staying long enough to see what’s underneath the surface. Maybe I’ll even figure out what the Lights-in-Water are.”
Hasalalo seemed to contemplate that. “You will live longer than me,” it said finally, slowly. “When I die, if you’re still here …” It stopped. It was staring out at the misty horizon, where the Great Darkness lay.
“If I’m still here …?” I prodded.
“They will throw my body into the Pit. After the wrigglers have taken my flesh, would you come for my stomach-stones? Would you find the truth inside them? And would you …”
Hasalalo didn’t finish, but it looked out toward the Great Darkness through the rain, and I knew what it wanted. I nodded. “I will,” I told it. “I promise.”
ELEANOR ARNASON
Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the nineties, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr., Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her other books are Ring of Swords and Tomb of the Fathers, and a chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, which includes the eponymous novella, plus an interview with her and a long essay. Her most recent book is a collection, Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo finalist in 2000. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Here she takes us along with a National Geographic safari headed out of Venusport to the wildest part of the Venusian Outback in search of dramatic wildlife footage, and where they find something much more dramatic than they had anticipated.
Ruins
ELEANOR ARNASON
OF COURSE, THE STORY BEGAN IN A LOW DIVE IN VENUSPORT, in the slums up on the hillside above the harbor. The proper town was below them: grid streets with streetlights, solid, handsome concrete houses, and apartment blocks. The people in the apartments—middle-class and working folks with steady jobs—had their furniture volume-printed in one of the city’s big plants. The rich folks in their houses patronized custom printing shops, where they could get any kind of furniture in any style.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God printed out the both of them
And ordered their estate
Not that it mattered up on the hill. The people here scraped by without regular jobs that could be relied on. There were always layoffs, when construction was cut back or the equipment from Earth did not arrive. If there were God-given rules for their lives, they didn’t know them.
The bar Ash was in had beat-up, previously owned chairs and tables. A dehumidifier–heating unit glowed against one wall because it was winter, and the usual winter rains fell heavily outside. It wasn’t cold that was a problem. No place on Venus was really cold, except the tops of a few tall mountains. But the damp could get in your bones.
Ash sat in a corner, her back against a wall. On the table in front of her was a glass of beer and a tablet. She was playing solitaire on the tablet. The game occupied her mind just enough to keep out old memories but left her with attention for the bar. It could be dangerous on payday nights, when people were flush and drunk¸ or after big layoffs, when people were angry and spending their last money. Tonight it was mostly empty.