The Vanishing Venusians
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 1
The breeze was steady enough, but it was not in a hurry. It filled the lug sail just hard enough to push the dirty weed-grown hull through the water, and no harder. Matt Harker lay alongside the tiller and counted the trickles of sweat crawling over his nakedness, and stared with sullen, opaque eyes into the indigo night. Anger, leashed and impotent, rose in his throat like bitter vomit.
The sea—Rory McLaren’s Venusian wife called it the Sea of Morning Opals—lay unstirring, black, streaked with phosphorescence. The sky hung low over it, the thick cloud blanket of Venus that had made the Sun a half-remembered legend to the exiles from Earth. Riding lights burned in the blue gloom, strung out in line. Twelve ships, thirty-eight hundred people, going no place, trapped in the interval between birth and death and not knowing what to do about it.
Matt Harker glanced upward at the sail and then at the stern lantern of the ship ahead. His face, in the dim glow that lights Venus even at night, was a gaunt oblong of shadows and hard bone, seamed and scarred with living, with wanting and not having, with dying and not being dead. He was a lean man, wiry and not tall, with a snake-like surety of motion.
Somebody came scrambling quietly aft along the deck, avoiding the sleeping bodies crowded everywhere. Harker said, without emotion, “Hi, Rory.”
Rory McLaren said, “Hi, Matt.” He sat down. He was young, perhaps half Harker’s age. There was still hope in his face, but it was growing tired. He sat for a while without speaking, looking at nothing, and then said, “Honest to God, Matt, how much longer can we last?”
“What’s the matter, kid? Starting to crack?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. When are we going to stop somewhere?”
“When we find a place to stop.”
“Is there a place to stop? Seems like ever since I was born we’ve been hunting. There’s always something wrong. Hostile natives, or fever, or bad soil, always something, and we go on again. It’s not right. It’s not any way to try to live.”
Harker said, “I told you not to go having kids.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“You start worrying. The kid isn’t even here yet, and already you’re worrying.”
“Sure I am.” McLaren put his head in his hands suddenly and swore. Harker knew he did that to keep from crying. “I’m worried,” McLaren said, “that maybe the same thing’ll happen to my wife and kid that happened to yours. We got fever aboard.”
Harker’s eyes were like blown coals for an instant. Then he glanced up at the sail and said, “They’d be better off if it didn’t live.”
“That’s no kind of a thing to say.”
“It’s the truth. Like you asked me, when are we going to stop somewhere? Maybe never. You bellyache about it ever since you were born. Well, I’ve been at it longer than that. Before you were born I saw our first settlement burned by the Cloud People, and my mother and father crucified in their own vineyard. I was there when this trek to the Promised Land began, back on Earth, and I’m still waiting for the promise.”
The sinews in Harker’s face were drawn like knots of wire. His voice had a terrible quietness.
“Your wife and kid would be better off to die now, while Viki’s still young and has hope, and before the child ever opens its eyes.”
Sim, the big black man, relieved Harker before dawn. He started singing, softly—something mournful and slow as the breeze, and beautiful. Harker cursed him and went up into the bow to sleep, but the song stayed with him. Oh, I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, comin’ for to carry me home...
Harker slept. Presently he began to moan and twitch, and then cry out. People around him woke up. They watched with interest. Harker was a lone wolf awake, ill-tempered and violent. When, at long intervals, he would have one of his spells, no one was anxious to help him out of it. They liked peeping inside of Harker when he wasn’t looking.
Harker didn’t care. He was playing in the snow again. He was seven years old, and the drifts were high and white, and above them the sky was so blue and clean that he wondered if God mopped it every few days like Mom did the kitchen floor. The sun was shining. It was like a great gold coin, and it made the snow burn like crushed diamonds. He put his arms up to the sun, and the cold air slapped him with clean hands, and he laughed. And then it was all gone...
“By gawd,” somebody said. “Ain’t them tears on his face?”
“Bawling. Bawling like a little kid. Listen at him.”
“Hey,” said the first one sheepishly. “Reckon we oughta wake him up?”
“Hell with him, the old sour-puss. Hey, listen to that...!”
“Dad,” Harker whispered. “Dad, I want to go home.”
The dawn came like a sifting of fire-opals through the layers of pearl-grey cloud. Harker heard the yelling dimly in his sleep. He felt dull and tired, and his eyelids stuck together. The yelling gradually took shape and became the word “Land!” repeated over and over. Harker kicked himself awake and got up.
The tideless sea glimmered with opaline colors under the mist. Flocks of little jewel-scaled sea-dragons rose up from the ever-present floating islands of weed, and the weed itself, part of it, writhed and stretched with sentient life.
Ahead there was a long low hummock of muddy ground fading into tangled swamp. Beyond it, rising sheer into the clouds, was a granite cliff, a sweeping escarpment that stood like a wall against the hopeful gaze of the exiles.
Harker found Rory McLaren standing beside him, his arm around Viki, his wife. Viki was one of several Venusians who had married into the Earth colony. Her skin was clear white, her hair a glowing silver, her lips vividly red. Her eyes were like the sea, changeable, full of hidden life. Just now they had that special look that the eyes of women get when they’re thinking about creation. Harker looked away.
McLaren said, “It’s land.”
Harker said, “It’s mud. It’s swamp. It’s fever. It’s like the rest.”
Viki said, “Can we stop here, just a little while?”
Harker shrugged. “That’s up to Gibbons.” He wanted to ask what the hell difference it made where the kid was born, but for once he held his tongue. He turned away. Somewhere in the waste a woman was screaming in delirium. There were three shapes wrapped in ragged blankets and laid on planks by the port scuppers. Harker’s mouth twitched in a crooked smile.
“We’ll probably stop long enough to bury them,” he said. “Maybe that’ll be time enough.”
He caught a glimpse of McLaren’s face. The hope in it was not tired any more. It was dead. Dead, like the rest of Venus.
Gibbons called the chief men together aboard his ship—the leaders, the fighters and hunters and seamen, the tough leathery men who were the armor around the soft body of the colony. Harker was there, and McLaren. McLaren was young, but up until lately he had had a quality of optimism that cheered his shipmates, a natural leadership.
Gibbons was an old man. He was the original guiding spirit of the five thousand colonists who had come out from Earth to a new start on a new world. Time and tragedy, disappointment and betrayal had marked him cruelly, but his head was still high. Harker admired his guts while cursing him for an idealistic fool.
The inevitable discussion started as to whether they should try a permanent settlement on this mud flat or go on wandering over the endless, chartless seas. Harker said impatiently:
“For cripesake, look at the place. Remember the last time. Remember the time before that, and stop bleating.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.