Collected Short Fiction, page 770
Out on the basin rim, we were still in radio range. Frankie made the driver stop to let me send a holovid fax back to our Manhattan office. I got him sitting at the wheel, hamming for the lens while he peered through the shield at the stark desolation ahead and described the crawler and the capture gun and his plans for the hunt.
“I’ll be back with the first trophy worm,” he promised. “Stay tuned!” Beyond the rim, we followed his map farther west, climbing through tangled hummocks of ancient lava into a jumble of newer flows and lava cones. A dismal day, as we counted human hours. That foreboding sky never changed, because the day of Venus is endless, even longer than its year.
The driver kept hinting uneasily that the sulfur stink came from some undiscovered microscopic leak that might grow larger. The mechanic was afraid the defective cooler might go out altogether, but Frankie had grown almost fanatic, scanning his map and leaning to see through his slit and shouting impatient commands. When the driver groaned and said he was beat, Frankie took the wheel himself.
Trying to look past him, I caught glimpses of rough, black cliffs, ejected boulders, and yawning lava tubes that looked wide enough to swallow us, but never a sign of anything alive. Nor any hint that anything here had ever been alive. Meriden was asleep in the seat beside me, her head on my shoulder, when his sharp scream aroused us.
“I see it! I see it! Vidman, quick!” The gears clashed and shrieked. “I saw it.” He raced us across that wilderness of tortured stone, battering us with reckless lurches and collisions, until at last he stopped the crawler and beckoned me back to the screen.
“I saw it right there.” He pointed at a jut of black basalt with a narrow scar across it. “A shining thing that slid into the cliff. Get the spot.”
I shot the fissure and the ledge.
“A real fireworm?” Meriden was still the skeptic. “Or just a lightning stroke? You hear odd reports of ball lightning—”
“Hah!” He sniffed. “Lightning’s only in the clouds. This air’s too dense for lightning on the surface.”
“Who says?” Her impish laugh became a weary yawn. “Let’s take a break.”
He let us take the break. The mechanic heated five of the prepacked meals the miners ate and we slept a few hours in our seats, the mechanic snorting and yelling in some tormented dream. Frankie woke us too soon, shouting for coffee. Meriden helped the mechanic brew a fresh urn. Frankie drained his mug and spread his map again and drove us on.
Late that day we came out on a wide, black plain that the driver said was the dead lava floor of another caldera. Frankie said he’d meet no fireworms there because all the reported sightings had been in rougher country. He took back the wheel to rush us across. I was half asleep when I heard him yell, “Vidman! Now!”
Peering over his shoulder, I saw the worm crawling ahead of us. Nothing I’d ever imagined. Closer to a snake than a worm, it shone like a thin tongue of yellow flame, or perhaps a wisp of bright yellow sand blown across that frozen lava sea. It seemed frantic, darting back and forth ahead of the crawler.
“Careful, Frank!” Meriden stared past me. “Don’t run it down!”
“Get it, vidman!” He ignored her. “Get it!”
He leaned to let me shoot through the shield. I got maybe five minutes of it before he was yelling in my ear.
“Enough! It’s looking for a hole. I’ve got to take it now. Get the action.”
I backed away to get him firing the capture gun. It made a dull boom. Shooting through the shield again, I caught a silvery metal net that spread in the air and snared the worm. It fought the meshes, writhing and striking like a snake, but Frankie closed the net around it and tightened a cable to pull it off the ground, up toward the muzzle of the long gun.
The driver was still groggy from sleep, rubbing his eyes and muttering curses of startled disbelief. The mechanic rummaged in his tool box and waved a dog-eared paper book.
“Shakespeare nearly had it.” He seemed bemused, as if Shakespeare mattered. “If he’d said, ‘There are more things in heaven and hell than are dreamt of—’ ”
He stopped because nobody was listening.
“Frank! Frank!” Meriden was pale and breathless, craning to see. Her anxious cry cut through the whine of the gears. “It’s alive! Frightened! Helpless!” She caught his arm. “Don’t you remember Star?”
Rigid for an instant, he turned to blink at her and swung back to yell at me, “Vidman! Get the battle!”
Close up, the worm looked like jelled fire, dimming and glowing again with some pulsing energy. It seemed half transparent, with flecks of blue light flashing and vanishing under the shimmer of its skin. Its narrow nose had thrust out though a mesh in the net. I counted five bright blue spots that seemed to peer like frightened eyes.
“Please, Frank! Please! If you love me—”
Her protest ended in a breathless gasp. I think the worm had thinned its long serpent shape in an effort to slide to freedom, but Frankie was pulling a lever that wound his cables in and crushed it tighter. The five-eyed nose came out again, and it kept fighting the meshes till Frankie pushed a red button on his capture machine. It writhed and went limp.
“A high-voltage jolt,” he told me, “to teach it who’s in control.” He turned to grin at Meriden. “Of course I love you, Merry, but the fireworm means more than the dog ever did. I’ve got it recorded on tape and safe in the net. So what do you think?”
“I think you’ve hurt it.” Her face looked tight and pale. “Maybe killed it.”
“No matter.” He swung to nod at his captive. “You saw me take it. Dead or alive, it wins our wager. Mom will go crazy, setting up a society wedding. I can see the skeptics eating crow. And my name’s made!”
She glanced silently at me. I wondered what she felt, but her ironic shrug said nothing.
Even for believers, the fireworms had been a baffling riddle, because no conceivable life type could survive under the pressures and temperatures of that acid atmosphere. Frankie kept saying the creature would prove a notion of his own, that their life processes were electric or magnetic, energized by radioactivity in the rocks where they lived.
He thought the captured creature must be an infant.
“It’s far smaller than the one I saw sliding into that fissure. Which is probably my good luck. A mature specimen might have been quick enough or smart enough to get away.”
He turned the crawler around and we jolted back toward Diamond Dike. He made me keep my camera on the cap-five as long as I could stay awake. It made a pathetic little huddle, helpless in the net and tossed back and forth beneath the gun barrel as the crawler lurched. Its yellow glow was fading slowly, and I caught no movement.
“Poor baby!” Meriden stood behind me, her hand on my shoulder. “It must be suffering.”
Frankie ordered her impatiently back to her seat, but when I got too groggy to run the camera, he muttered an apology and let her take it. I must have slept. The next I knew I lay sprawled in the aisle.
“What hap—” Frankie was yelling at the driver. “What the hell!”
“Where else, sir?” The driver turned to grin at him, impudence only half concealed. “Just another minor quake. The price, you might say, the devil asks for diamonds. Our seismos register a hundred bigger tremors every year.”
The crawler was motionless, the howling gears still. The mechanic helped me off the floor, saying the quake had almost overturned us. Meriden looked shaken, but she was soon pouring mugs of that foul coffee. Frankie stood a long time staring out through the heat screen.
“I wonder—” He turned at last back to us, rubbing nervously at that thin moustache. “The creatures live underground. Most of the sightings have been near earthquake fractures, most commonly during or just after quakes. Do you imagine—” He licked at a smear of blood on his lip. “Could they possibly—” He blinked uncertainly at me. “Possibly make the quakes?”
“Huh?” I managed not to laugh. “You think they’re hitting back?”
“God knows!” The diver looked startled. “I never thought they were real. But now—”
Meriden turned to look through the heat shield and stifled a little cry.
“The pitiful thing!” she whispered. “Dying, I think.”
When Frankie ordered me back with the camera, I saw that the fireworm was dead. Its body looked tiny in the net, shriveled to a little knot of wrinkled yellow rope. I kept the tape running while it crumbled into flakes of yellow dust that fell through the meshes and settled very slowly through the dense air. In only a couple of hours, the net hung empty.
“That what you wanted?” Meriden was staring hard at Frankie when I turned back from all that remained of the worm, a little patch of bright yellow dust on the old black lava. Her face was stiff and bitter. “Happy about it?”
“I did get my worm.” His narrow chin jutted defiantly. “With tapes to prove it, and you for a wit—”
The crawler shook. I heard an appalling sound that seemed to come from far below, a deep-toned moan that swelled into a furious bellow and finally into bone-jarring thunder.
“If your worms are demons—” The driver squinted grimly at Frankie, shouting through that dazing roar. “Better hang on!”
The shock struck before I got my seat belt buckled, It knocked me back into the aisle, the mechanic sprawled on top of me. Another jolt hit before we had our breath, and yet another. Silence struck us when they stopped, stunning as another shock. Gasping for breath, feeling for wounds, we dragged ourselves off the floor.
“Thank God it’s over—if it is!”
The driver found an aid kit and Meriden helped him spray our cuts and bruises. The mechanic mopped up the spilt coffee and offered more. Frankie turned back to the shield and stood rigid, squinting back into the east.
“That sky!” The driver peered past him. “I don’t like it. Let’s get back to the Dike.”
They used the external waldos to scrape up samples of that golden dust and Frankie drove us back toward the mine. Staring over his shoulder, I tried to see the sky. It looked dead black between blinding lightning flashes that showed something falling, flakes like snow swirling down in slow motion through the heavy air.
“Ash!” the driver rasped. “Volcanic ash.”
It grew thicker, till Frankie admitted he was lost. The driver took the wheel and the crawler roared on, plowing through drifts of the loose ash, skidding into hidden pits, crashing into cliffs it couldn’t climb. We were all mauled and exhausted, but Meriden stayed beside me.
“Sorry you came?” she whispered.
“Are you?”
She squeezed my hand.
And we blundered blindly on through that fog of fire-lit ash. Now and again the driver tried the radio. All he got was blasting static till at last he said we were on the basin rim, back in short-wave range. He stopped the crawler to listen with his headphones. His black-stubbled face grew grimmer.
“The mine?” Frankie reached for the headset. “Let me talk.”
The driver shook his head. “Nobody listening.”
“So what are you hearing?”
“A recorded message. Left on the repeater to alert us. The seismic net was reporting violent activity all over Aphrodite Terra before it went out. Heavy shocks all along the major faults. Lava domes swelling. Mount Karst, just north of the Dike, already exploding.”
“A recording?” Frankie’s long face went white. “Why?”
“They didn’t say.” The driver shrugged. “If you want my guess, they remember the Lady Jane. Probably already taking off on the Ishtar. Hoping to save their hides.”
“Which leaves us—” The mechanic went pale.
Meriden looked at me and laughed.
“What’s funny?” Frankie demanded, his voice gone hoarse.
“I was just wondering,” she said. “Wondering if killing that baby worm made its people angry.”
His mouth opened as if to retort. He shivered instead and snapped at the driver. “Get on!”
We drove on across the black crags of the old caldera rim and down into a heavier fall of ash, a swirling curtain that hid everything. Constant thunder hammered us, louder than the screaming gears. Frankie crouched over the driver, yelling in his ear.
The crawler slid down a long slope, lurched across the ravine at the bottom, and stalled on the ridge beyond. The engine died. The lights went out. Suddenly sharper, that sulfur reek stung my eyes. In the lurid lightning glaring through the shield, I saw the driver scrabbling frantically at the controls.
They were useless. The dead machine shuddered to another quake, shuddered again. I pushed to Frankie’s side to look out through the screen. The crawler had stalled as we tipped up to climb. All I could see was that savage sky, suffocating blackness, and lurid purple lighting.
“If they call it hell—”
Frankie gasped, sagged back into his seat as if stricken. Meriden caught my arm. I heard her quick intake of breath and realized that the thunder had ceased. So had the constant quakes. For a moment we were blind, but then I saw a faint glow born above us, slowly brightening. A soft golden light, it had the color of the live fireworm.
Nobody spoke. After that first frozen moment, we all shuffled forward to stare through the shield. The fall of ash had stopped. The air cleared slowly, till we could see the wide basin floor spread out below us, amber-colored and almost luminous under that strange sky. I found the red-crowned caissons of the mine, the horde of great black robotic machines around them, the Ishtar still on the ground.
Meriden moved closer, her live warmth good against me. Together we watched that transformed sky. As the ash cleared, that uncanny glow revealed an edge, a smooth, bright curve that ran just above us, covering all the basin. It shook me with terror.
“More things,” I heard the mechanic murmur. “More than we dreamt of.”
“Your damn worms!” the driver shouted at Frankie, his voice quivering with tension. “If they live down in the rocks, what happened to the sky?”
Frankie sat rigid, staring up.
“Venus—” A coughing fit cut off the mechanic’s solemn croak till he straightened to wipe his eyes and gasp, “Strange! Stranger than we ever knew. Stranger than we humans can know!” Nobody spoke, but I knew that something in the sky had sheltered us. Like the hand of God, I thought, spread above us to halt the lightning, stop the raining ash, quiet the quakes. Yet of course it was not God. I’d never believed in God. The event was simply too much for me, something beyond all belief or understanding.
“If we killed their baby—” Meriden’s fingers gripped my hand. Her whisper died away and came faintly back. “If they have this power, the power to teach us such a lesson, why should they save us?”
I knew no answer.
The engine started when we tried itagain. That glow in the sky lighted our way across that old caldera, back to the mine. We found the crew there no wiser than we were. Kallio seemed numb with shock.
“Quakes are nothing.” He shook his dark-shining head. “But this—”
He stopped to stare at me as if begging for comfort nobody could give him. Something he didn’t understand had shut off the power and stopped every machine at the mine. Even the coolers. After less than a minute, however, something had let them start again.
“A few seconds more could have killed us all.”
Yet Diamond Dike was still alive, and Kallio was soon trying to bring us up to date. Radio contact with Earth had been cut off even before the seismic net was lost. Now alive again, the instruments here at the Dike showed a few distant quakes but nothing at all under Aphrodite Terra.
He took us back to the lookout dome for a better view of that inexplicable sky. Its glow was featureless but sharply edged, like a smooth, yellow moon somehow come impossibly close. The horizons were black beneath it, flickering with faraway lightning.
“This golden light—don’t you feel it?” Meriden smiled at me, her whisper hushed with the awe that had touched us all. “It makes me feel—grand! The way you imagine a good drink should.”
I did have a surprising sense of relaxed well-being, my cuts and bruises no longer painful. Diamond Dike seemed suddenly a pleasant place, and I felt too happy to wonder why. We scrubbed, ate a prepacked meal that tasted unexpectedly good, and slept until Kallio called us to breakfast with news that the fire cloud was fading.
“I’ve got the answer.” He grinned at Frankie, with an air of cheery relief. “When Mt. Karst exploded, the hot gas plume made a giant smoke ring, punching through those high sulfuric clouds. That unusual glow overhead was only natural sunlight breaking through the hole.”
“Could be.” Frankie seemed relieved. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Nonsense!” the gaunt mechanic muttered to Meriden and me as we walked out. “Or half-sense. The problem is, we don’t belong here. Our human brains evolved to cope with Earth. They’re simply not the tool for understanding Venus.” He glanced back at Kallio and Frankie, a wry grin twisting his dark-stubbled lip. “If the fireworms think, they do it with a sort of mind we’ll never understand. To them, Venus may be heaven.”
By noon the Venusian sky looked normal again, those stormy yellow clouds riven once more with high lightning, the thunder muffled to a distant rumble. Kallio still seemed a little addled when we met with him at lunch, but he told us that contact with Earth had been restored.
“If I knew what to say—” He scowled across the table at Frankie, bafflement in his blood-shot eyes. “I’ve got lab reports on your yellow dust. It has all decayed to very common molecules, mostly oxides and sulfides of iron. Evidence of nothing—”
“We’ve got his holovids.” Frankie jerked his head at me. “Proof enough.”
“Forget the vids,” Kallio told him. “Rawler’s legal and publicity people have advised him to sit on your fireworm story. Too controversial to fit our advertising image of Venusian diamonds as eternal verities.”
