Mad Mikhail smiled at him. “Unless you think you can speak to them, I will have to go with you, yes? And I will have to hire a boat, yes?”
Ronson knew without asking that the fee was going to be considerable. But he’d brought plenty of rubles with him, and he could always recoup his expenses from his client. “All right. Tell them that we …”
Mikhail didn’t have a chance to translate. With no more conversation, the three frogheads suddenly turned and dove off the dock. Their bodies barely made a splash as they disappeared into the dark water. In an instant, they were gone.
“That was fast,” Ronson muttered.
“We have an understanding. They will come back tomorrow morning.” Mikhail turned away from the dock’s edge, started walking back toward his shack. “Be here then. I will hire a boat and pilot to take us where they lead us. Dasvidan’ye.”
“See you later.” At least he’d have time to buy new clothes and the equipment he’d need—namely a Taser, seeing that was the only kind of weapon he was permitted to carry. Yet he couldn’t help but notice the guarded expression on Mad Mikhail’s face and wonder if there was something the old man wasn’t telling him.
The Aphrodite was a beat-up fishing boat with rain-warped deck planks and a wooden hull that appeared to have been patched many times. To Ronson’s surprise, its captain was an American: Bart Angelo, middle-aged and a bit warped himself, smelling of fish and with ivory hair thinning at the top of his head. Forty thousand rubles was a lot to pay for the charter of a weathered old tub, but Ronson had little choice in the matter. He talked Angelo down to thirty-five thousand, and was grateful that he wouldn’t have to also pay for a crew that the captain had decided to leave behind.
The frogheads returned, just as Mikhail said they would. Ronson assumed they were the same three he’d met yesterday, but he couldn’t tell for sure. They didn’t climb on the dock again, though, but instead lingered in the water beside the Aphrodite, half-submerged eyes steadily watching the men as they prepared to leave. Ronson wondered how they’d known which boat they’d use; Mikhail told him that they’d simply waited until they spotted him and Ronson again, then followed them to the Aphrodite.
“They are not animals,” Mikhail added, giving him a stern look. “The Water Folk are intelligent … never forget that.”
Hearing this, Angelo laughed out loud. “If they’re so damn smart, then how come they keep getting tangled in my nets?”
“And what happens when they do?” Mikhail asked.
“They chew their way out.” The captain finished counting the wad of money Ronson had just handed him and shoved it in his shorts pocket. “Goddamn critters cost me a repair bill whenever they do that.”
Mikhail smiled knowingly. He didn’t reply, though, but instead went aft to loosen the stern line. Ronson heard him murmur something in Russian; he had no idea what he’d said, but it sounded rather amused.
The frogheads joined the Aphrodite as it chugged out of Veneragrad’s harbor. They swam alongside until the boat passed the outer buoys, then moved out front and surfed its bow wake as the boat picked up speed, occasionally breaching the surface just as if they were dolphins. Ronson was concerned at first that the captain would run them down, but once Angelo throttled up the diesel engines to twenty knots, the Water Folk returned to their previous positions. They had no difficulty keeping up with the boat; never once did Ronson or Mikhail completely lose sight of them.
Veneragrad gradually disappeared behind them, becoming smaller and smaller until it faded into the misty, perpetual rain. Long before it vanished over the horizon, though, they saw other signs of the human presence on Venus. They passed fishing schooners and tour boats heading out for the day, and at one point crossed the wake of one of the massive sea-dragon trawlers that prowled the global ocean for weeks on end. In the distance, they made out a tall structure erected on stilts: an oil derrick, probably owned by a Russian-Arab consortium, positioned just above a sea mount. Small, single-mast sailboats took advantage of the mild weather and fair winds, but only a couple; Venus was not a planet for pleasure boating, and amateur sailors were the kind who often vanished and were never seen again.
By early afternoon, though, all other vessels had disappeared, and Aphrodite was the only boat on the ocean as far as the eye could see. Yet it wasn’t alone. The first of the vine islands had come into view, and the Water Folk were leading the boat straight to them.
Ronson had never been a good student—he’d dropped out of college to join the NYPD, which in turn eventually led him to become a PI—but he remembered enough from his high-school science classes to recall the planet’s natural history. Billions of years ago, Venus had been Earth’s twin sister, and even similar enough to Mars to make the panspermia hypothesis a possible explanation for a shared genetic heritage among humans, the Martian shatan, and frogheads. At some point in the planet’s early eras, though, the Sun had raised the average global temperatures enough to cause a catastrophic greenhouse effect, which melted the polar ice caps and formed the permanent cloud layer with its incessant rain. Eventually the entire planet was flooded, its landmasses inundated before tectonic shifts could keep them above the rising waters.
All that remained was a global ocean, yet beneath the watery surface were the old continents with their canyons and mountain ranges, like some vast Atlantis that would never again see the light of day. In some places, the ocean bottom lay only a dozen or so fathoms down, and it was here that underwater vegetation grew in abundance. One of the most common forms of marine plant life was a thick, ropy kind of seaweed that, once it grew large enough to become buoyant, tended to break free and float to the surface. Ocean currents gradually caused these weeds to clump together and form floating islands, some kilometers in length.
Over countless millennia, life evolved on these drifting isles. The frogheads were one kind; the slickbark trees that were a harvestable source of everything from timber to pharmaceutical drugs to yaz were another. And once humans learned how to travel between planets, the people of Earth discovered that Venus was a world rich with resources just waiting to be exploited.
Not everyone was happy about this.
“We are raping this planet.” Mad Mikhail leaned against the starboard rail, watching the frogheads as they swam toward a vine island not much larger than a house. One of them had approached the boat and told Mikhail, in its croaking native tongue, that they needed a rest, so Angelo had grudgingly complied and dropped sea anchor near the next island they came upon. Now the Russian was in a reflective mood, breaking the pensive silence he’d maintained since leaving Veneragrad.
“Rape?” Angelo sat beneath the tarp strung as a canopy across the aft deck, eating a sandwich he’d made in the galley. “Don’t talk about your sister that way … it’s not nice.”
Mikhail ignored him, as did Ronson. The captain had an ugly sense of humor; Ronson had discovered this when he’d joined him for a while in the wheelhouse, only to have Angelo start telling him jokes that grew progressively more disgusting until he found an excuse to leave. “Why do you say that?” he asked, turning his back to the captain.
“We come here,” Mikhail said, “and we take and we take and we take, but we give nothing back.” He nodded toward the frogheads; they lay prone upon the island’s matted weeds, vines, and moss, dozing in the midday heat. “They suffer the most. We steal their forests, pollute their water with oil, ruin their islands …”
“And then they hang around Veneragrad so they can mooch candy bars from you.” Angelo shrugged. “Sounds like a fair trade to me.”