Old Venus E-Book

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 962

Beschreibung

Sixteen all-new stories by science fiction's top talents, collected by bestselling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award-winning editor Gardner Dozois. It turns back the clock to that more innocent time, before the hard-won knowledge of science vanquished the infinite possibilities of the imagination.

Leseprobe

Also by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

By George R. R. Martin

A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

Book One: A Game of Thrones

Book Two: A Clash of Kings

Book Three: A Storm of Swords

Book Four: A Feast for Crows

Book Five: A Dance with Dragons

The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones

Dying of the Light

Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle)

Fevre Dream

The Armageddon Rag

Dead Man’s Hand (with John J. Miller)

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

Dreamsongs: Volume I

Dreamsongs: Volume II

A Song for Lya and Other Stories

Songs of Stars and Shadows

Sandkings

Songs the Dead Men Sing

Nightflyers

Tuf Voyaging

Portraits of His Children

Quartet

EDITED BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

New Voices in Science Fiction, Volumes 1–4

The Science Fiction Weight Loss Book (with Isaac Asimov and Martin Harry Greenberg)

The John W. Campbell Awards, Volume 5

Night Visions 3

Wild Cards I–XXII

CO-EDITED WITH GARDNER DOZOIS

Warriors I–III

Songs of the Dying Earth

Songs of Love and Death

Down These Strange Streets

Old Mars

Dangerous Women

Rogues

By Gardner Dozois

NOVELS

Strangers

Nightmare Blue (with George Alec Effinger)

Hunter’s Run (with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham)

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

When the Great Days Come

Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois

Geodesic Dreams

Morning Child and Other Stories

Slow Dancing Through Time

The Visible Man

EDITED BY GARDNER DOZOIS

The Year’s Best Science Fiction #1–30

The New Space Opera (with Jonathan Strahan)

The New Space Opera 2 (with Jonathan Strahan)

Modern Classics of Science Fiction

Modern Classics of Fantasy

The Good Old Stuff

The Good New Stuff

The “Magic Tales” series 1–37 (with Jack Dann)

Wizards (with Jack Dann)

The Dragon Book (with Jack Dann)

A Day in the Life

Another World

Old Venus

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781783297863

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781783297870

E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297887

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

First edition: March 2015

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2015 by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Gardner Dozois

Individual story copyrights appear on here

All rights reserved.

Title page illustration by Stephen Youll

Old Venus is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

This edition published by arrangement with Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.titanbooks.com

Book design by Donna Sinisgalli

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger, who would love to paint the wallowing dinosaurs of swampy Venus

Contents

Cover

Also by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Return to Venusport by Gardner Dozois

FROGHEADS by Allen M. Steele

THE DROWNED CELESTIAL by Lavie Tidhar

PLANET OF FEAR by Paul McAuley

GREEVES AND THE EVENING STAR by Matthew Hughes

A PLANET CALLED DESIRE by Gwyneth Jones

LIVING HELL by Joe Haldeman

BONES OF AIR, BONES OF STONE by Stephen Leigh

RUINS by Eleanor Arnason

THE TUMBLEDOWNS OF CLEOPATRA ABYSS by David Brin

BY FROGSLED AND LIZARDBACK TO OUTCAST VENUSIAN LEPERS by Garth Nix

THE SUNSET OF TIME by Michael Cassutt

PALE BLUE MEMORIES by Tobias S. Buckell

THE HEART’S FILTHY LESSON by Elizabeth Bear

THE WIZARD OF THE TREES by Joe R. Lansdale

THE GODSTONE OF VENUS by Mike Resnick

BOTANICA VENERIS: THIRTEEN PAPERCUTS BY IDA COUNTESS RATHANGAN by Ian McDonald

Story Copyrights

About the Editors

IntroductionReturn to Venusport

BY GARDNER DOZOIS

DAWN ON VENUS:

The sleek, furry heads of the web-footed amphibious Venusians break water near one of the rare archipelagos in the world-girdling ocean. Nearby, the toothy head and long, snaky neck of a Plesiosaur-like sea creature momentarily rears above the waves. Elsewhere, vast swamps are pocked and shimmered by the ceaseless, unending rain, while immense dinosaurian shapes grunt and wallow in the mud. Elsewhere, tall, spindly people in elaborate headdresses and jewel-encrusted robes walk across rope bridges strung between huge trees, bigger by far than any Terrestrial Redwood or Sequoia, and the spreading ashen light reveals that there’s an entire city up there, up in the trees. Elsewhere, shining silver rockets are landing at the spaceport at Venusport. Still elsewhere, the thick, fetid, steamy jungle is ripped asunder by a dinosaur-like beast, reminiscent of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, who emerges from the dripping vegetation and opens his massive, dagger-studded mouth to roar defiance at the morning.

Then, one day in 1962, all these dreams abruptly vanish, like someone blowing out a candle.

People have always noticed Venus (and sometimes worshipped it), perhaps because it’s the brightest natural object in the night sky, other than the Moon. In ancient times, they thought Venus was two separate objects, the Morning Star and the Evening Star—the Greeks called them Phosphoros and Hesperos, the Romans Lucifer and Vesper. By Pythagoras’s day in the sixth century B.C., it was recognized as a single celestial object, which the Greeks called Aphrodite, and the Romans called Venus, after the goddesses of love in their respective religions. Somehow, Venus has always been associated with goddesses, perhaps in contrast with the second-brightest object in the night sky, Mars, which because of its ruddy color was associated with war, usually the province of men and of male gods. The Babylonians, who realized it was a single celestial object hundreds of years before the Greeks, called it “the Bright Queen of the Sky,” and named it Ishtar, after their goddess of love, the Persians would call it Anahita after a goddess of their own, and Pliny the Elder associated Venus with Isis, a similar Egyptian deity. This earned it a nickname, still occasionally used, the Planet of Love.

When telescopes were invented, Venus could be seen to present a bright but featureless face to observation, and the idea slowly developed that Venus was shrouded in a permanent layer of clouds, unlike Mars or Mercury or the Moon, and speculation as to what might be beneath the swaddling clouds began, earning Venus its other nickname, the Planet of Mystery.

Clouds meant rain, and a planet permanently shrouded in clouds must certainly be a planet where it rained. A lot.

Just as future speculation about Mars was shaped by American astronomer Percival Lowell, who trained telescopes on Mars and believed that he saw canals there, most future speculation about what lay beneath the clouds of Venus was shaped and given direction by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who speculated, in his 1918 book, The Destinies of the Stars, that the Venusian clouds must be composed of water vapor, and went on to say that “everything on Venus is dripping wet … A very great part of the surface of Venus is no doubt covered with swamps, corresponding to those of the Earth in which the coal deposits were formed … The temperature on Venus is not so high as to prevent a luxuriant vegetation. The constantly uniform climatic conditions which exist everywhere result in an entire absence of adaptation to changing exterior conditions. Only low forms of life are therefore represented, mostly no doubt, belonging to the vegetable kingdom; and the organisms are nearly of the same kind all over the planet.”

This idea, that the surface of Venus was covered with swamps, making it resemble Earth in the Carboniferous Period, would be the ruling paradigm for almost the next fifty years, along with the related idea that Venus was an ocean world, perhaps consisting only of one world-encircling sea. So pervasive was this vision that as late as 1964, Soviet scientists were still designing the Venera Venus probes for the possibility of landing in liquid water.

As the subgenre of the Planetary Romance slowly precipitated out of the older body of pulp adventure, the swamps grew jungles and dinosaurs, and the seas grew monsters.

In the heyday of the Planetary Romance, also called Sword and Planet stories, roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s, the solar system swarmed with alien races and alien civilizations, as crowded and chummy as an Elks picnic, with almost every world boasting an alien race that it would be possible for a Terran adventurer to have swordfights or romances with, even Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury. Mars always claimed pride of place, and was the preferred setting for most Planetary Romances—but Venus wasn’t far behind.

Venus had appeared as a setting in religious allegories and Fabulous Journey stories throughout the nineteenth century, but the first Planetary Romance to take us there, something recognizable as what we’d today consider to be science fiction, was probably Otis Adelbert Kline’s 1929 novel Planet of Peril (and its sequels The Prince of Peril and Port of Peril), in which Earthman Robert Grandon is telepathically transported into the mind of a Venusian, gets involved with warring native races, and has many sword-swinging adventures on a Venus that features forests of giant trees (due to the lower gravity) and dinosaur-like monsters. Kline’s novels were almost certainly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, which took a similarly swashbuckling Earthman to the Red Planet, called Barsoom by Burroughs, and which had been a sensation upon its publication in 1915. Burroughs would retaliate by sending his own Terran adventurer, Carson Napier, to Venus in 1932 in his Pirates of Venus (and its four sequels), and the era of the Planetary Romance was launched.

The purest expression of the Planetary Romance story was probably to be found between 1939 and 1955 in the pages of Planet Stories, which featured work by Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, A. E. Van Vogt, Poul Anderson, and many others, and which (unusually for a subgenre that had been heavily male-dominated) may have found its finest practitioners in two female authors, C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett. Ray Bradbury published some of his famous Martian Chronicles stories in Planet Stories, and although Bradbury visited Venus there as well in stories like “The Long Rain” and “All Summer in a Day,” he remained mostly best known for his Martian stories. Although both wrote about Mars as well, Venus belonged to Moore and Brackett. C. L. Moore’s hard-bitten spaceman Northwest Smith adventured there in company with his Venusian sidekick Yarol in stories like “Black Thirst,” and Leigh Brackett’s heroes quested for adventure and fabulous treasures across a swampy, sultry Venus full of decadent Venusian natives, dangerous low bars where the unwary might get their throats slit, lost civilizations, and forgotten gods, in stories like “Enchantress of Venus,” “Lorelei of the Red Mist” (with Bradbury), and “The Moon That Vanished.”

Venus also featured as a setting in somewhat more mainline science fiction as well, outside of the confines of the pure Planetary Romance story (which, truth to tell, was looked down upon as somewhat raffish and déclassé by the core science-fiction fans), being visited by Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men, C. S. Lewis in Perelandra, John W. Campbell in “The Black Star Passes,” Henry Kuttner in Fury, Jack Williamson in Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock, Isaac Asimov in the YA series of Lucky Starr books, A. E. Van Vogt in The World of Null-A, Robert A. Heinlein in “Logic of Empire,” Space Cadet, Between Planets, and Podkayne of Mars, Fredrick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth in The Space Merchants, Poul Anderson in “The Big Rain” and “Sister Planet,” and no doubt in hundreds of other stories, most long forgotten.

Then, abruptly, the Venus bubble burst.

On December 14, 1962, the American Mariner 2 probe passed over Venus, and the readings from its microwave and infrared radiometers were dismaying for anyone holding out hope for life on the planet’s surface, showing Venus to be much too hot to support life. These findings were later confirmed by the Soviet Venera 4 probe, and by other probes in both the Mariner and Venera series, and the picture they painted of Venus was very far from salubrious. In fact, far from being a planet of world-girdling oceans or vast swamps and jungles, far from being a home for mysterious alien civilizations, Venus was revealed as being one of the places in the solar system that was the most hostile to life: with a surface temperature averaging 863 degrees Fahrenheit, it was the hottest planet in the solar system, hotter even than the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury; the famous permanent cloud cover was composed of clouds of sulphuric acid, not water vapor; the atmosphere was composed of 96.5 percent carbon dioxide, and the atmospheric pressure at the planet’s surface was ninety-two times that of Earth, as severe as on the bottom of the Earth’s oceans.

There couldn’t possibly be any life on Venus. No dinosaurs. No web-footed amphibious natives. No ferocious warriors to have swordfights with or beautiful green-skinned princesses in diaphanous gowns to romance. It was just a ball of baking-hot rock and scalding poisonous gas, duller than a supermarket parking lot.

Almost at once, science-fiction writers lost interest.

There was one last great Venus story published, the nostalgic and deliberately retro (since the author certainly knew better by then) “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” by Roger Zelazny, published in 1965.

By 1968, Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison had edited a retrospective anthology called Farewell, Fantastic Venus!, bidding a nostalgic farewell to the Venus story.

And after that, the Venus story effectively disappeared.

For a while.

Few if any stories set on Venus—or, for that matter, on Mars, or on any of the other planets of the solar system—were published in science fiction in the seventies. By the eighties, though, and in an accelerating fashion throughout the nineties and the oughts, science-fiction writers began to become interested in the solar system again, as subsequent space probes began to make it seem a much more interesting and even surprising place than it had initially been thought to be. They even returned to Venus, as the idea of terraforming Venus to make it conducive to life—something first suggested, as far as I know, in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men in 1930—began to be explored by writers like Pamela Sargent and Kim Stanley Robinson. Dome cities armored against the heat, intense pressure, and poisonous atmosphere of Venus began to appear in stories like John Varley’s “In the Bowl,” as did even more popular options, huge space stations in orbit around the planet or floating cities that hover permanently in the cooler upper layers of Venus’s atmosphere.

So there have been plenty of stories about the New Venus in the last couple of decades. One of them, using the floating-cities model, Geoffrey A. Landis’s “The Sultan of the Clouds,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2011.

But some of us missed the Old Venus, the Venus of so many dreams over so many years.

So why not write about it?

After all, as my coeditor George R. R. Martin pointed out in his introduction to this anthology’s companion volume, Old Mars, science fiction is and always has been part of the great romantic tradition in literature, and romance has never been about realism. After all, as Martin says, “Western writers still write stories about an Old West that never actually existed in the way it is depicted; ‘realistic Westerns’ that focus on farmers instead of gunslingers don’t sell nearly as well. Mystery writers continue to write tales of private eyes solving murders and catching serial killers, whereas real life PIs spend most of their time investigating bogus insurance claims and photographing adulterers in sleazy motels for the benefit of divorce lawyers. Historical novelists produce stories set in ancient realms that no longer exist, about which we often know little and less, and fantasy writers publish stories set in lands that never did exist at all.”

So why not rekindle the wonderful, gorgeously colored dream of Old Venus?

So we contacted some of the best writers we know, both established names and bright new talents, and told them that we weren’t looking for pastiches or postmodern satire, or stories set on the kind of terraformed, colonized modern Venus common in most recent science fiction, or orbital space colonies circling the planet high above, or domed cities set in hellish landscapes with poisonous atmospheres, but for stories set in the kind of nostalgic, habitable Venus found in the works of writers like Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, Otis Adelbert Kline, Poul Anderson, Robert A. Heinlein, and so many others, before the hard facts gathered by space probes blew those dreams away. Stories set in the old-style Venus of vast swamps and limitless oceans and steaming jungles and wallowing dinosaurs. And Venusians, another sentient race to interact with, one of the great dreams of science fiction, whether that interaction involved swordfights or romance or close scientific observation or exploitation or uneasy coexistence.

The results of those newly hatched dreams of Venus are to be found in this anthology, stories that will take you to places that you’ve never been—but will not regret having visited.

ALLEN M. STEELE

In the suspenseful story that follows, we accompany a tough PI to Venus on a risky mission that takes him down some very Mean Streets indeed—even if, on Venus, there aren’t any streets.

Allen Steele made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1988, soon following it up with a long string of other sales to Asimov’s, as well as to markets such as Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age. In 1989, he published his critically acclaimed first novel, Orbital Decay, which subsequently won the Locus Poll as Best First Novel of the year, and soon Steele was being compared to Golden Age Heinlein by no less an authority than Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Clarke County, Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, The Weight, The Tranquillity Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, Chronospace, Coyote, Coyote Rising, Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, Coyote Horizon, and Coyote Destiny. His short work has been gathered in three collections, Rude Astronauts, Sex and Violence in Zero-G, and The Last Science Fiction Writer. His most recent books are a new novel in the Coyote sequence, Hex, a YA novel, Apollo’s Outcasts, an alternate history, V-S Day, and the collection Sex and Violence in Zero-G: The Complete “Near Space” Stories: Expanded Edition. He has won three Hugo Awards, in 1996 for his novella “The Death of Captain Future,” in 1998 for his novella “… Where Angels Fear to Tread,” and, most recently, in 2011 for his novelette “The Emperor of Mars.” Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he has worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines, covering science and business assignments, and is now a full-time writer living in Whately, Massachusetts, with his wife, Linda.

Frogheads

ALLEN M. STEELE

THE SHUTTLE FELL THROUGH THE CLOUDS—CLOUDS AS DENSE as grey wool, separating purple sky and sun above from perpetual rain below—for what seemed like a very long time until the windows finally cleared and Venus’s global ocean lay revealed: dark blue, storm-lashed, endless.

Engines along the spacecraft’s boatlike underbelly fired, forming a concentric circle of white-peaked wavelets that spread outward upon the ocean surface. Gradually the shuttle made its final descent until its hull settled upon the water. As careful as the pilots were, though, the splashdown was rough. A swift, violent jolt passed through the passenger compartment, shaking everyone in their seats, causing an overhead storage compartment to snap open and spill a couple of carry-on bags into the center aisle. Through the compartment, people cursed—mainly in Russian although a few American obscenities were heard as well—and someone in the back noisily threw up, an involuntary act that was greeted by more foul language.

Ronson wasn’t happy about the landing either. This wasn’t the first time he’d traveled off-world, but landing on Mars was mild compared to this. He couldn’t blame the guy a few rows back for getting sick. Although the shuttle was no longer airborne, it still remained in motion, slowly bobbing up and down as it was rocked by the ocean. He’d been warned to take Dramamine before boarding, and he was glad he’d heeded the advice.

Clutching the armrests, Ronson gazed through the oval porthole beside his seat. Rain spattered the outer pane, but he could still see where he was. Not that there was much to look at: ocean for as far as the eye could see—the Venusian horizon was about three miles away, nearly the same as Earth’s at sea level—beneath a slate-colored sky bloated by clouds that had never parted and never would. The shuttle was supposed to make planetfall at Veneragrad, but the floating colony must be on the other side of the spacecraft. Unless, of course, the pilots had miscalculated the colony’s current position and had come down—landed wasn’t the proper word, was it?—in the wrong place.

That was a possibility. Ronson had spent the last four months in hibernation, but his waking hours aboard the Tsiolkovsky had shown him that Cosmoflot’s reputation for ineptitude was well deserved. He’d just begun to consider the possibility that the shuttle was lost at sea when a tugboat came into view. Smoke belching from its funnel, the rust-flecked craft circled the shuttle until it passed out of sight once again. Several minutes went by, then there was a thump as its crew attached a towline to the shuttle’s prow. The shuttle began to move forward again, the tug hauling it toward its final destination.

Everyone on his side of the passenger compartment peered through the windows as the shuttle pulled into Veneragrad, including the middle-aged Russian in the aisle seat who unapologetically leaned over Ronson as he craned his head for a look at the man-made island. Veneragrad was as utilitarian as only a Soviet-era artifact could be: a tiered hemisphere a kilometer in diameter, a shade darker than the ocean it floated upon, the long, wooden piers jutting out from its sides giving it the appearance of an enormous, bloated water spider. Rickety-looking platforms, also constructed of native timber, rose as irregularly spaced towers from the outside balconies; they supported the open-top steel tanks that caught the rain and distilled it as the colony’s drinking water. Radio masts and dish antennae jutted out at odd angles from near the top of the dome; a helicopter lifted off from a landing pad on its roof. An ugly, unwelcoming place.

“Looks bad, yes?” The man seated beside him stared past him. “Better than nothing … it’s dry.”

Ronson had already learned that his traveling companion spoke English, albeit not very well. His breath reeked of the vodka he swilled from a bag-wrapped bottle on the way down from orbit; he’d opened it as soon as the shuttle entered the atmosphere. “Is this where you live?” he asked, if only for the sake of being polite. “Is this your home, I mean?”

The other man barked sullen laughter. “This hellhole? No! My home, St. Petersburg. Come here to make money. Sell … um … ah”—he searched for the right word—“computers, yes? Computers for office.”

Ronson nodded. He wasn’t much interested in making friends with the businessman, but it appeared that conversation was unavoidable. “Whole colony, built in space above Earth, sent here by rockets,” the businessman continued, telling Ronson something he already knew. “Dropped from orbit by para … para …”

“Parachutes.”

“Parachutes, yes. Come down”—he lifted his hands—“sploosh! in water.” He waved the bag toward the window. “People then build onto it. Wood from floating … um, forests, yes? Floating forests on moss islands.”

“Yes, I see.” Again, the businessman wasn’t telling him anything new.

“Yes, you see.” The Russian took another swig from his bottle, then offered it to Ronson. “So why you come here?”

Ronson shook his head at the bottle. There were several ways he could get out of this unwanted conversation. He opted for the easiest approach. “I’m a detective,” he said, and when the businessman gave an uncomprehending look, he rephrased his answer in simpler, if inaccurate, terms. “A cop.”

“A cop. Yes.” The businessman gave him the distrustful look Ronson anticipated, then withdrew the bottle and settled back into his seat.

Ronson didn’t hear from him again for the rest of the way into port. Which suited him well. He didn’t want to talk about why he’d come to Venus.

* * *

The heat hit him as soon as he stepped through the hatch. It was like walking into a sauna; the air was hot and thick, hard to breathe, humid beyond belief. The sun was larger and warmer here than on Earth, yet little more than a bright smear in the sky that heated up the atmosphere. Ronson began to sweat even before he reached the end of the wooden gangway that led from the hatch to the pier where the shuttle had been berthed. A fine, almost misty rain was falling, and it too was warm; he didn’t know whether to take off the denim jacket he’d worn on the way down or keep it on. The dockworkers didn’t seem to mind. Most of them wore only shorts, sneakers, and sometimes a rain hat, with the women wearing bikini tops or sports bras. They unloaded the bags from the cargo bay, and Ronson took a few moments to find his suitcase before walking the rest of the way down the pier to the spaceport entrance.

There were only a couple of customs officers on duty, bored-looking Russians in short-sleeve uniform shirts who regarded the line of passengers with bureaucratic disdain. The officer Ronson approached silently examined his passport and declaration form, gave his face a quick glance, then put his stamp on everything and shrugged him toward an adjacent arch. No one had asked him to open his bag, but he knew what was about to happen. Sure enough, bells rang from the arch as soon as he walked through it. Its weapons detector had found the gun he was carrying.

Just as well. It only meant that he’d meet the police sooner than he had planned.

An hour of sitting alone in a detention area, another half hour of angry interrogation by a port-authority officer whose English wasn’t much better than the businessman’s, then Ronson was loaded onto an electric cart and spirited to police headquarters. Along the way, he got what amounted to a nickel tour of Veneragrad. The colony seemed to consist mainly of narrow corridors with low ceilings and low-wattage light fixtures, their grey steel walls decorated with grime, handprints, and stenciled Cyrillic signs, then the cart passed through a broad doorway and Ronson suddenly found himself in the city center: a vast atrium, its skylight ceiling a couple of hundred meters above the floor, with interior balconies overlooking a central plaza. As the cart cut across the plaza, Ronson caught glimpses of Veneragrad’s daily life. Residents in shorts, vests, and T-shirts resting on park benches, hanging laundry on balcony clotheslines, standing in line in front of fast-food kiosks. A group of schoolchildren sitting cross-legged near a fountain, listening as their young teacher delivered a lesson. Two men in a heated argument; another couple of men watching with amusement.

A statue of V. I. Lenin stood in the center of the plaza. Incongruously dressed in a frock coat and high-collar shirt no Venusian colonist would be caught dead wearing—even inside the city, the air was tropically warm—he pointed toward some proud socialist future just ahead. But the statue was old and stained, and a broken string that might have once been a yo-yo dangled from the tip of his finger. The Communist Party was just as dead on Venus as it was on Earth; it was just taking the locals a little longer to get rid of its relics.

The cart entered another dismal corridor, then came to a halt in front of a pair of battered doors painted with a faded red star. The port-authority officer who’d questioned Ronson ushered him through the crowded police station to a private office, and it was here that he met Arkandy Bulgakov.

Veneragrad’s police chief was about Ronson’s own age, short and broad-chested, with the short-banged Caesar haircut that never seems to go out of style with European men. Seated at a desk piled with paperwork, he listened patiently while the officer delivered a stiff-toned report of the visitor’s offense, punctuated by placing Ronson’s Glock on the desk along with its extra clips, then Bulgakov murmured something and waved the officer out of the room. He waited until the door was shut, then he sighed and shook his head.

“You’re the same guy who e-mailed me a while ago about the missing kid?” His English was Russian-accented but otherwise perfect.

“That’s me.” Ronson motioned to an empty chair in front of the desk; Bulgakov nodded, and he sat down. “Sorry about the gun. I was going to tell you about it when I reported in, but …”

“We don’t allow private ownership of firearms. Didn’t you know that?”

“I figured that my license might exempt me.”

“No exemptions here. Only police are allowed to carry lethal weapons.” Bulgakov’s chair squeaked as he leaned forward to pick up the Glock; he briefly weighed it in his hand before opening a drawer and dropping it in. “I won’t fine you, but you may not carry this. I’ll give you a receipt. You may reclaim it when you leave.”

“All right, but what am I supposed to use until then? I might need a sidearm, you know.”

“To find a missing person? I doubt it.” Catching Ronson’s look, the chief shrugged. “You can buy a Taser if it makes you feel better, but only if you’re going outside the city. And if that’s the case, then your chances of finding this fellow …”

“David Henry.”

“… David Henry alive are practically zero. At any rate, he’s not in Veneragrad, I can tell you that right now.”

“That’s what you told me five months ago,” Ronson said, “and that’s what I told my client, too. But the old man isn’t satisfied. His kid was last seen here nearly a year ago, when he came to Venus on a trip his dad bought him as a college-graduation gift.”

Bulgakov raised a querulous eyebrow. “His father must be rich.”

“The family has a few bucks, yeah, and the kid likes to travel. He’s already been to the Moon and Mars, so I guess Venus was next on his list. Personally, if he was my boy, I would’ve given him a watch, but …”

“We don’t have many tourists, but we do get some. His kind is not unfamiliar. Privileged children coming to see the wonders of Venus”—a brief smirk—“such as they are. They go out to the vine islands, take pictures, collect a few souvenirs. Now and then they get in trouble … a bar fight, dope, soliciting a prostitute … and they wind up here. But they eventually go home and that’s the end of their adventure.”

“That’s not how it ended for him. He didn’t come home.”

“So it appears.” Bulgakov turned to the antique computer on one side of his desk. He typed something on the keyboard, then swiveled the breadbox-size CRT around so that Ronson could see the screen. “This is him, yes?”

Displayed on the screen was a passport photo of a young man in his early twenties: moonfaced, arrogant blue eyes, sandy hair cut close on the sides and mousse-spiked on top. Good-looking but spoiled. The same boy in the picture his father had given Ronson when he’d visited the family home in Colorado Springs. “That’s him.”

Bulgakov turned the screen back around, typed in something else, paused to read the information that appeared. “He was registered at the Gastinitsa Venera,” he said after a few seconds, “but failed to check out. When my detectives went there to investigate, they were told that his luggage was found in his room, which apparently he hadn’t visited for several days before his scheduled departure aboard the Gagarin. My men visited all the restaurants, shops, and bars, and although he’d been noticed in some of them, no one who worked in those places had seen him recently. And, of course, he failed to appear at the Cosmoflot departure gate to make his shuttle flight.”

“You told me this already, remember? In your e-mail.” This was a waste of time. Which was what he’d expected; local police were seldom much help in missing-person cases. Still, he always made a point of checking in with the cops. Professional courtesy, mainly, but there was always the chance that he might learn something he could use.

“So I did, and I imagine that you shared the information with gospodin Henry. And when he contacted the Russian consulate in Washington … he did this, yes? … he told them this as well.” Bulgakov leaned back in his chair. “Very well, let me tell you what I didn’t say in my e-mail, because the government back home doesn’t like to admit certain things and would be upset with me if I stated them in an official letter. On occasion … not often, but every once in a while … a young man like David Henry disappears while visiting Venus. Sometimes he wanders down the docks after he has been drinking all night, falls off a pier, and drowns, and his body is devoured by scavenger eels. That has happened. Sometimes he goes out on a boat tour with an unlicensed operator who’s actually a criminal, who robs him, murders him, and leaves his body to rot on an island. That’s happened, too. And sometimes … well, worse things happen.”

“Such as?”

Bulgakov hesitated. “You’ve heard of vityazka, haven’t you?”

“Yaz? Who hasn’t?”

“That’s the street name back home. Vityazka iz kornia is what it’s called here.” Bulgakov warmed to the subject. “It’s derived from the same slickbark trees that grow on some of the vine islands and from which the pharmaceutical industry has bioharvested koren-medicant, a clinical analgesic used in hospitals. But while koren comes from tree bark, vityazka comes from the roots. A narcotic as addictive as heroin …”

“And tastes just as bad when you smoke it,” Ronson finished. “Know all about yaz. It’s all over America and Europe.”

Bulgakov scowled. He clearly didn’t like being interrupted. “What you probably aren’t aware of is exactly how the smugglers are getting it. Their growers … yaz croppers, we call them … go out to islands where slickbark trees are found. On the islands the drug companies have already harvested, they recover the tree roots left behind and process them for yaz. But everything that goes into this … cutting, boiling, curing … is hard work, not something anyone willingly wants to do. So sometimes they’ll abduct some poor tourist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and force him into hard labor.”

“And you think that’s what happened to David Henry? He was shanghaied?”

“I’d say that’s a strong possibility.”

Ronson slowly let out his breath. His job had just become much more difficult. “If you’re right, then how do I find him? I understand those islands can drift quite a long distance …”

“There are thousands of them being carried by the ocean currents, and the croppers do a good job staying hidden. My people have always had trouble tracking them down. Locating the boy on one particular island will be difficult.” Bulgakov paused. “However, there may be a way. As you Americans say, it’s a long shot, but …”

“As we Americans say, I’m all ears.”

“Talk to a froghead.”

“A what?”

“Frogheads. The native aborigines. No one calls them Venusians … sounds like a bad movie. Anyway, they’re intelligent”—another smirk—“although I wouldn’t call them good company. And they see a lot of what goes on here.”

“I can’t even speak Russian. How am I supposed to talk to …?”

“I know someone who does. Mad Mikhail. You can find him down on the docks. Bring lots of rubles.” Bulgakov smiled. “And chocolate, too.”

“Chocolate?”

“You’ll see.”

* * *

Mad Mikhail hung out on the waterfront. Everyone who worked there knew who he was; all Ronson had to do was follow their pointing fingers to a small shack set up on the dock where the tour boats were moored.

Mad Mikhail made sushi from whatever he’d been brought by local fishermen, which he then sold to tourists. When Ronson found him, he was sitting on a stool inside his open-sided shack, cutting up something that looked like a cross between a squid and a lionfish and wrapping the filets around wads of sticky rice. He was a squat old man with a potbelly and fleshy arms and legs, his dense white beard nearly reaching his collarbone. His skin was wrinkled and rain-bleached, and he wore nothing but a frayed straw hat and baggy shorts; when he looked up at Ronson, it was with eyes both sharp and vaguely mystical.

“Sushi?” he asked, his rasping voice thickened by a Ukrainian accent. “Fresh today. Very good. Try some.”

Bulgakov had warned Ronson not to eat anything Mad Mikhail offered him; whatever he failed to sell today, he’d simply keep until tomorrow even if it had been spoiled by the heat and humidity. At least he spoke English. “No thanks. I’ve been told you can help me. I want to talk to a froghead.”

Mikhail’s eyes narrowed. “They are not frogheads. They are the Water Folk, the Masters of the World Ocean. You do not respect them, you do not talk to them.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know they …”

Mikhail slammed the long knife he’d been using down on the counter before him. “No one knows this! They call them frogheads, make jokes about them. Only I”—he jabbed a scarred thumb against his bare chest—“make friends with them when I came here over thirty years ago! Only Mikhail Kronow …!”

“You’ve been on Venus thirty years?” Ronson seized the chance to change the subject. “That means you would have belonged to one of the first expeditions.”

“Da.” He nodded vigorously, not smiling but at least no longer shouting. “Second expedition, 1978. Chief petty officer, Soviet Space Force.” A smile appeared within the white nest of whiskers. “The others went home, but I stayed. No one in Veneragrad been here longer …!”

“Then, Chief Petty Officer Kronow, you’re the person I need to see.” The best way to handle Mad Mikhail would be to appeal to his vanity. “I’d like to speak with the Water Folk … or rather, have you speak with them on my behalf since you know them so well.”

Mikhail’s gaze became suspicious. “About what? If it’s only a picture you want … pfft! Fifteen hundred rubles, they come up, you stand next to them, I take your picture. Take it home, put it on the wall. ‘See, there’s me with the frogheads.’” Disgusted, he spat over the side of the dock.

“I’m not a tourist, and I don’t want a picture.” Ronson reached into the pocket of his trousers—he’d have to buy shorts soon; his Earth clothes were beginning to stick to him—and produced the snapshot of David Henry his father had given him. Holding it beneath the shack’s awning so that the rain wouldn’t get it wet, he showed it to Mikhail. “I’m looking for this person. He came here almost a year ago, then disappeared. His family sent me here to find him.”

Mad Mikhail took the photo, closely inspected it. “I do not know this boy,” he said at last, “but the Water Folk would. If he went out to sea, they would have seen him. They see everyone who goes out into the World Ocean. You have chocolate?”

Ronson had purchased a handful of Cadbury bars at the hotel shop. He pulled them out and showed them to Mikhail. The old man said nothing but simply gave him a questioning look. Ronson found his money clip, peeled off several high-denomination notes, held them up. Mikhail thought it over for a moment. “Very well,” he said at last, easing himself down from his stool. “Come with me.”

He emerged from the shack wielding a cricket bat, the sort an Englishman would carry to a sports field. Taking the money and the chocolate bars from Ronson, he led the detective down the dock, passing the boats tied up alongside. Captains and crew members lounging on their decks watched him with amusement; someone called to him in Russian and the others laughed, but Mad Mikhail only scowled and ignored them.

He and Ronson reached the end of the dock. A wooden light post rose above the water slurping against the dock’s edge. The former cosmonaut raised the cricket bat and, with both hands, slammed it against the post: two times, pause, then two more times, another pause, then two more times after that. Mikhail stopped, peered out over the water, and waited a minute. Then he hit the post six more times, two beats apiece.

“This is how you summon fro … the Water Folk?” Ronson wondered if he was wasting his time.

“Yes.” Mikhail turned his head back and forth, searching. “They hear vibrations, come to see why I call them. They do this for no one but me.”

He’d barely completed his third repetition when, one at a time, three dark blue mounds breached from the rain-spattered surface just a couple of meters from the dock. With a chill, Ronson found himself being studied by three pairs of slitted eyes the color of tarnished pewter. Those eyes were all he could see for a few moments, then Mikhail held up the chocolate bars and the creatures swam closer.

“Move back and give them room,” Mikhail said quietly. “Do not speak to them. They will not understand you.”

One by one, the Venusian natives emerged from the water, climbing up onto the dock until they stood before Ronson and Mikhail. Each stood about a meter and a half in height, the size of a boy, and were bipedal, but their resemblance to humans ended there. They looked like a weird hybrid of a frog, a salamander, and a dolphin: sloping, neckless heads, broad-mouthed and lipless, with protruding eyes; sleek hairless bodies, streamlined and mammalian, their slender arms and legs ending in webbed, four-fingered hands and broad, paddlelike feet; short dorsal fins running down their backs, away from blowholes that vibrated slightly with each breath and tapered off as reptilian tails that barely touched the wet planks of the dock.

Ronson couldn’t see any anatomical differences between males and females even though he knew that the natives had two genders. Each were naked, their light blue underbellies revealing no obvious genitalia; only subtle splotches and stripes upon their wine-colored skin distinguished one individual from another.

And they smelled. As they came out of the water, his nose picked up a fetid, organic odor that reminded him of an algae bloom in summer. The stench was offensive enough to make him step back, and not just because Mad Mikhail had asked him to do so. If they came any closer, he was afraid he’d lose his lunch.

Ronson had recently read a magazine article about how an Egyptian-American scientist, who’d perished during a dust storm on Mars, had discovered just before his death certain genetic evidence linking Homo sapiens to the native aborigines of the Red Planet. He wondered if much the same link might exist between the people of Earth and the Water Folk of Venus, and was both intrigued and disgusted by the thought he might be related, in some distant way, to these … frogheads.

Mikhail unwrapped the chocolate bars and offered them to the natives. As he did so, he addressed them in a low, warbling croak: “Wor-worg wokka kroh woka.” It sounded like nonsense to Ronson, but the Water Folk apparently understood him. The ones on the left and right bobbed their heads up and down and responded in kind—“Worgga kroh wohg”—and moved toward him in a waddling, forward-hunched gait that might have been clumsy if it hadn’t been so fast.

Only the native in the center remained where it was. It watched its companions with what seemed to be disdain as they each took a chocolate bar from Mikhail. When they opened their mouths, Ronson was startled to see that they contained rows of short, sharp teeth, with slightly longer incisors at the corners of the upper set. He was even more startled by the way they gobbled down the chocolate bars. Repulsively long tongues snatched the candy from their webbed hands; chocolate bars that even a hungry child might have taken a couple of minutes to eat were devoured in seconds. And yet the third froghead—Ronson couldn’t help but to think of it that way—refused the bar that Mikhail held out to it.

“Why doesn’t it take it?” Ronson whispered.

“I do not know,” Mikhail murmured; he was a bit surprised himself. “They have never done that before.” He raised his voice again. “Wagga kroh?”

“Kroh wogko!” The third froghead’s tail swung back and forth in what seemed to be an angry gesture, its dull silver eyes narrowing menacingly. “Kroh wogko wakkawog!”

“What did it say?”

Mikhail didn’t respond at once. He held out the bar for another moment or two, then slipped it in his pocket. The other two Water Folk made hissing noises that sounded like protests, but the third one stopped thrashing its tail and appeared to calm down a little. “The one in the middle is the leader,” Mikhail said softly. “She …”

“You can tell it’s a she?”

“Their leaders are always females. She refused the chocolate because … I think … she said it’s poisonous.” He shrugged. “I am not sure. I speak their language, yes, but some words of theirs I do not know well.”

“But this is the first time you’ve seen any of them refuse chocolate?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been giving it to them for many years. They love kroh. Nothing else like it on Venus. This is how I have made friends with them, learned how to talk to them.” A thoughtful pause. “I do not know why one of them would refuse to take it. Very strange.”

“Well, that’s interesting, but I’ve got a job to do.” Ronson pulled out David Henry’s photo again. “Show this to them,” he said as he handed it to Mikhail, “and ask if they’ve seen him.”

The reaction was immediate. The moment Mikhail held up the photo, all three frogheads became agitated. Their tails swished back and forth, sometimes slapping the dock boards, as their heads bobbed up and down. They hissed, the leathery tips of their tongues slipping in and out of their mouths, and air whistled from their blowholes. Then the clan leader pointed to the photo and spoke in a rapid stream of angry-sounding croaks.

“Oh, yes … they recognize him, all right.” Mikhail was just as surprised as Ronson. “And I do not think they like him very much.”

“I kinda figured that. Ask if they know where he is.”

Mikhail addressed the frogheads again, and once more they responded with head bobs and tail slaps. Then the leader bent almost double, shifted slightly to the left, and raised her tail to point to the left. Mikhail listened as she spoke to him at length, then he turned to Ronson.

“She knows where he is … on a moss island that’s now some distance from here. She said she will lead us to him, but only if we will take him away.”

“That’s exactly what I want.” Then he darted a look at Mikhail. “You said ‘we’?”

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.”

“No. Not fair.” Mikhail cast a cold glare at him. “Chocolate for a world … not a fair trade at all.”

“Yeah, well … look who got ’em hooked on it in the first place.” Noticing Ronson’s quizzical look, Angelo sneered. “You mean you don’t know? Chocolate is addictive to frogheads. Like cocaine, maybe even worse. Once they’ve had a taste, they gotta get more. And guess who got ’em started on it?”

“You lie!” Mikhail’s face was red. “I was not the first to do this! One of my shipmates …”

“O, sure. Maybe it wasn’t you, but you’re their number one pusher.” Angelo tossed the remnant of his sandwich overboard, wiped his hands against his shorts. “And if you’re not, then why don’t you toss over those candy bars you brung?”

Mikhail looked away, avoiding the accusation Angelo had made. Ronson wondered if it was true. “One day, we will pay for what we have done here,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, well … you’re paying me for this trip and the day ain’t getting any shorter.” Angelo stood up from the barrel, headed for the wheelhouse. “Tell the froggies to rise and shine. I want to find this place and go home.”

* * *

The captain didn’t get his wish. At the end of the day, the frogheads still hadn’t reached their destination, forcing Aphrodite to seek another island where it could anchor for the night. Again, the frogheads found a place to rest on its mossy, vine-covered banks.

As darkness fell on the ocean, Angelo opened a locker on the aft deck and pulled out a large net. Ronson thought at first that he intended to go trawling, but instead Angelo told him and Mikhail to rig the net above the boat, from the wheelhouse roof to poles erected at the stern, until the deck was completely covered. Angelo then switched off the deck lamps, and once the three of them went below he closed the curtains in the cabin portholes.

They’d barely finished dinner when Ronson discovered the reason why the captain had taken such precautions. From somewhere outside came the sound of wings flapping, punctuated by high-pitched shrieks. Mikhail explained that they belonged to one of Venus’s few avian species: night shrikes, nocturnal raptors not much larger than the pelicans they vaguely resembled but dangerous nonetheless. The shrikes hunted in flocks, seeking prey near the islands where they nested; they had little fear of humans, and had been known to gang up on unwary sailors who ventured out on deck after dark. The nets would keep them away, and if that didn’t work, a Taser shot was sufficient to drive them off. Still, the best defense was to remain inside until daybreak.

Through the night, long after the three of them had crawled into their bunks, Ronson heard the shrikes prowling around the boat. Distant thunder and lightning flashes glimpsed around the edges of the porthole curtains told of an approaching storm. It came in around midnight, and although it only rocked the boat a bit and threw rain against the portholes, it kept Ronson awake for a while. He lay in his bunk, Taser beneath his pillow, listening to the shrikes and the storm.

Venus was a dangerous world.

Yet the morning was calm. The rain had slackened to a mild drizzle, the sun a hot splotch half-seen through the clouds. The frogheads were croaking impatiently beside the boat when Ronson and the others emerged from the cabin. Mikhail gave chocolate bars to two of the aborigines—as before, their leader refused to accept any—while Angelo and Ronson took down the net and hoisted the anchor. Then the captain started the engine and Aphrodite set out again, the frogheads once more taking the lead.

The floating isles had become bigger and less far apart by then, and for the first time, Ronson saw forests on the larger ones. Slickbark trees looked like palmettos but grew in dense jungle clusters, their broad trunks strangled by vines, their broad, serrated leaves casting shadows across the surrounding water.

Around midmorning, Aphrodite came within sight of a larger vessel going the other way: a lumber ship the size of a small freighter, its deck loaded with cut and trimmed tree trunks. The lumber ship blew its horn as it went by, but Angelo didn’t respond to the hail.