The thought shocked him more deeply than he had thought possible. This world wasn’t natural; it was like a corpse, strangled.
WE UNDERSTAND HOW TO KILL A WORLD, Cassiopeia said. WE EVEN UNDERSTAND WHY.
“Competition for resources?”
BUT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THAT DANCER KILLED HERSELF.
“It was ritual, Cassiopeia. As far as I could see. Religion, maybe.” The dancers couldn’t possibly understand the story of their world, the meaning of the ancient fossils. Maybe they thought they were the bones of the giants who had created their world.
But this was the most alien thing of all to the Gaijin.
MALENFANT, WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES A SENTIENT BEING SACRIFICE THE POSSIBILITY OF A TRILLION YEARS OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR AN IDEA?
“Hell, I can’t tell you that.”
BUT YOU DID THE SAME WHEN YOU CAME THROUGH THE SOL GATEWAY. YOU COULD NOT KNOW WHAT LAY ON THE OTHER SIDE. YOU MUST HAVE EXPECTED TO DIE.
“What is this, Anthropology 101? Is this so important to you?”
The answer startled him.
MALENFANT, IT MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL.
The planet was folding over, dwindling into a watery blue dot, achingly familiar. But it was the scene of a huge crime, a biocide on a scale he could barely comprehend — and one committed so impossibly long ago.
“So strange,” he murmured. “Earth, the Solar System, contains nothing like this.”
The Gaijin would not reply to that, and he felt a deep, abiding unease.
But the Solar System was primordial. You could see that was true.
Wasn’t it?
Chapter 11
Anomalies
Carole Lerner drifted out of the air lock.
She was tethered by a series of metal clips to a guideline, along which she pulled herself hand over hand. The line connected her ship to a moonlet. The line seemed flimsy and fragile, strung as it was between spaceship and moonlet, two objects that floated, resting on no support, in empty three-dimensional space.
But it was a space dominated by an immense, dazzling sphere, for Carole Lerner was in orbit around planet Venus.
Before Carole had come here — the first human to visit Venus, Earth’s twin planet — nobody even knew Venus had a moon. Her mother had spent a life studying Venus, and never knew about the moon, probably never even dreamed of being here, like this.
With no sensation of motion, floating in space, she and her ship swept around the planet, moving into its shadow so that it narrowed to a fine-drawn crescent. Close to the terminator, the blurred sweep that divided day from night, she saw shadowy forms: alternating bands of faint light and dark, hazy arcs. And near the equator there seemed to be yellowish spots, a little darker than the background. But these details were nothing to do with any ground features. All of these wisps and ghosts were artifacts of the strange, complex structure of Venus’s great cloud decks — or perhaps they were manufactured by her imagination, as she sought to peer through that thick blanket of air.
Now, at the apex of her looping trajectory, she moved deep into the shadow of the planet, and the crescent narrowed further, becoming a brilliant line drawn against the darkness. As the Sun touched the cloud decks there was a brief, startling moment of sunset, and layers in the clouds showed as overlaid, smoothly curving sheets, fading from white down to yellow-orange. And then a faint, ghostly ring lit up all around the planet: sunlight refracted through the dense air.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the stars coming out one by one, framing that ringed circle of black. But one star, as if a rogue, moved balefully across the equator of that black disc, glowing orange-yellow. It was a Gaijin flower-ship, one of the small fleet that had followed her all the way here from the Moon.
“The cloud tops of Venus,” Nemoto whispered, her voice turned to a dry autumn-leaf rustle by the low-quality radio link. “I envy you, Carole.”
Carole grunted. “Another triumph for man in space.” She waited the long minutes as her words, encoded into laser light, crossed the inner Solar System to Earth’s Moon.
“You are facetious,” Nemoto eventually replied. “It is not appropriate. You know, I grew up close to a railway line, a great transport artery. I lay in my parents’ small apartment and I could hear the horns of the night freight trains. My parents were city dwellers; their lives had been static, unchanging. But the night trains reminded me every night that there were vehicles that could take me far away, to mountains, forest, or sea.
“The Gaijin frighten me. But when I see their great ships sailing across the night, I am stirred by a ghost of the wanderlust I enjoyed, or suffered, as a girl. I envy you your adventure, child…”
Incredible, Carole thought. I’ve traveled a hundred million kilometers with barely a word from that wizened old relic, and now she wants to open up her soul.
She twisted in space and looked back at her ship.
It was a complex collection of parts — a cylinder, bulging tanks, a cone, a giant umbrella shape, a rocky shield — all fixed to an open, loose framework of struts made from lunar aluminum. The shield was made of blown lunar rock: gray, imposing, now heavily scorched and ablated. The shield had protected her on arrival at Venus, when her craft had dived straight into the upper atmosphere, giving up its interplanetary velocity to air friction. The big central cylinder was her hab module, the cramped box within which she had endured the long flight out here. The hab trailed a rocket engine unit — gleaming pipes and tanks surrounding a gaping, charred nozzle — and big soft-walled tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel that would bring her out of Venusian orbit and back home to Earth’s Moon. A wide, filmy umbrella was positioned on long struts before the complex of components. The umbrella, glistening with jewel-like photovoltaic cells, served as sunshade, solar energy collector, and long-range antenna.
Stuck to the side of the hab module was her lander: a small, squat, silvery cone with a fat, heavy heat shield. The lander was the size and shape of an old Apollo command module. This tiny, complex craft would carry her down through Venus’s clouds to the hidden surface, keep her alive for a few days, and then — after extracting much of its fuel from Venus’s atmosphere — bring her back to orbit once more.
The craft looked clunky, crude, and compared to the grace of Gaijin technology very obviously human. But after such a long journey in its womblike interior, Carole felt an illogical fondness for the ship. After all, the trip hadn’t been easy for it either. The thick meteorite-shield blankets swathed over its surface were yellowed and pocked by tiny impact scars. The paintwork had been yellowed by sunlight and blistered by the burns of reaction-control thrusters. The big umbrella had failed to open properly — one strut had snapped in unfurling — causing the ship to undergo ingenious maneuvers to keep in its limited shade.
Fondness, yes. Before she left the Moon, Carole had failed to name her ship. She’d thought it sentimental, a habit from a past to which she didn’t belong. She regretted it now.
“…No wonder we missed the moon,” Nemoto was saying. “It’s small, very light, and following an orbit that’s even wider and more elliptical than yours, Carole. Retrograde, too. And it’s loosely bound; energetically it’s close to escaping from Venus altogether—”
She turned to face the moonlet. It swam in darkness. It was a rough sphere, just a hundred meters across, its dark and dusty surface pocked by a smattering of craters.
Carole knew she wasn’t in control of this mission, even nominally. But she was the one who was here, looping extravagantly around Venus. “Are you sure this is necessary, Nemoto? I came here for Venus, not for this.”