Old Venus

Planet of Fear

PAUL McAULEY

ACROSS THE GLISTENING SLICK OF THE SUBTROPICAL SARGASSO, amongst shoals and archipelagos of bladderweed, several thousand sunfish floated in intersecting circles of churning foam. They were big, the sunfish, big humped discs ten or fifteen or even twenty meters across, patched with clusters of barnacles and thatched with purple-brown thickets of strapweed and whipweed, and all around them soldier remoras flailed and fought, flashing and writhing in frothing, blood-blackened water. A quadrocopter drone hung high above this shambles like a lonely seabird, avid camera eyes transmitting images to the ekranoplan anchored several kilometers beyond the sargasso’s southern edge.

In the close warmth of the fire-control bay, bathed in the radiance of three big flatscreens, Katya Ignatova asked the petty officer piloting the drone to lock its cameras on a particular pair of sunfish. They were matched in size, each about twelve meters in diameter, and the fringes of their feeding tentacles had interlaced and fused and were now contracting, drawing them together. Dead and dying soldier remoras bobbed around them: slim, silvery torpedoes with chunks torn out of their flanks, shovel jaws gaping, eye clusters filmed white. Venusian fish were armored in bony chain mail, had external gills and horizontal tail fins resembling whale flukes, but they possessed swim bladders. Like terrestrial fish, their corpses floated.

The drone pilot said, “Such fury. Such waste.”

“Soldiers attack everything that gets too close to their sibling,” Katya said. “Including other sunfish. They can’t mate until their soldiers have been neutralized. But the dead aren’t wasted. Their flesh feeds the ecosystem where the next generation develops.”

She hunched forward as the pair of sunfish began to jab at each other with the spears of their spermatophores, and asked the drone pilot if he could get a close-up of the action.

“No problem,” he said, and made delicate adjustments to the joystick that controlled his little craft.

The views on the screens tilted and shifted, stabilized again. Katya prompted the pilot to zoom in on the tip of a calcified spear that scratched amongst drifts of purple-brown weed before abruptly driving forward.

“I believe they call that the money shot,” the pilot, Arkadi Sarantsev, said.

He was a slender, cynical fellow in his midtwenties, a few years younger than Katya. She had noticed that he kept apart from the companionable clamor in the mess, reading a vivid paperback thriller as he forked food from his tray. Sitting close to him in the television light, she could smell the cola-nut oil he’d used to sleek back his black hair.

“It isn’t sex as we know it,” she told him. “Sunfish are hermaphrodites, both male and female. If you could zoom out now … Yes. You see? Each has speared the other. They are exchanging packages of sperm. Injecting them into special areas of haploid epithelial cells that will develop into egg masses.”

She planned to collect some of those egg masses in a day or two, when the mating battles were over, to test the hypothesis that they contained both fertilized eggs that produced juvenile sunfish and unfertilized eggs that produced haploid soldiers. She hoped that she would be able to examine the rich and varied biota of the sargasso, too. The swarms of isopods and shrimp and thumb jellies on which sunfish larvae fed; the tripod octopi and fish which fed on them.

They really were amazing creatures, sunfish. They were eusocial, like ants, bees, and mole rats, with sterile, neotenous soldiers and fertile queens which not only lost their bilateral symmetry, like flatfish or the sunfish of Earth, but also lost their digestive systems, their eyes, and most of their nervous systems. And they were also symbiotic associations, like corals or lichens. The dense fringes of feeding tentacles of the queens, which filtered and digested plankton and extruded strings of nutrient-rich nodules which the schools of soldier remoras devoured, were derived from symbiotic ribbon jellies; the strapweeds and whipweeds rooted in their dorsal shells pumped sugars and lipids into their bloodstreams. Amazing creatures, yes, and really not much like anything at all on Earth.

Usually they led solitary, pelagic lives, drifting everywhere on the shallow seas of Venus, but every seventeen years they migrated to the sargassos where they had hatched, possibly following geomagnetic and chemical cues (another theory that needed to be tested), and mated, and spawned the next generation, and died. Katya’s observations and data would contribute to a multidisciplinary research program into their life cycle, part of the International Biological Year, a milestone in the growing cooperation and rapprochement between the Venusian colonies of the People’s Republic, the United States, and the British Commonwealth.

On the central screen, the two sunfish slowly revolved on the blood-black swell. On the screens to the left and right, a wider view showed other sunfish pairs ponderously locking together and surviving soldiers spending their fury on each other or on ripping apart smaller, unsuccessful sunfish.

Katya asked Arkadi Sarantsev to take his machine higher, was watching intently as it circled the entire area, trying to make sure she captured a good image of every pairing, when the ekranoplan’s turbofans started up with a shuddering roar. A few moments later a seaman leaned into the hatch of the little room and told Arkadi to bring in his drone.

“Captain Chernov’s orders,” he said when Katya protested, and couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her questions.

She pushed past, hauled herself along the pitching companionway, and climbed to the teardrop cockpit that, with its pale wood and polished brass trim, the diffuse overcast of the cloudroof gleaming through its canopy, always reminded her of the luncheon room of the Engineers’ Union where her mother, the architect I. V. Ignatova, took her every birthday for a ritual meal of beefsteak and cultivated wild mushrooms. The pilot and navigator were hunched in their horseshoe of switches and dials and computer screens; Captain Vladimir Chernov was enthroned behind them, sipping from a glass of black tea; all three wore bulky headsets. The ekranoplan had made a cumbersome turn away from the sargasso, and now the pilot gripped the throttle levers by his thigh and eased them forward. The roar of the big turbofans, mounted on canards behind the cockpit, ramped up as the ekranoplan began to accelerate.

Katya grabbed a spare headset to muffle the incredible noise and braced herself in the hatchway during the shuddering lurch of takeoff. She had learned the hard way that she could not speak to the captain in the cockpit until he acknowledged her, and he didn’t acknowledge her until the ekranoplan was under way.

An adaptation of the famous curable-maket, the Caspian Sea Monster, it resembled a gigantic airplane but was really a wing-in-ground-effect machine that rode on the cushion of air generated by its turbofans and square, stubby wings: a long-range, lightly armed beast capable of speeds of up to three hundred knots. It was making top speed now, skimming some five meters above long, rolling waves, skimming over breakers frothing across sea-lily reefs. On its way to investigate an emergency at the People’s Republic’s most northerly outpost, Makarov Mining Station, according to Captain Chernov.

“I am sorry about the abbreviation of your studies,” he told Katya, “but the station sent a disturbing message two days ago and has not responded since. Although we are not the nearest vessel, we can reach it before anyone else.”

He did not look at all sorry: he appeared to be enjoying himself. A burly, broad-shouldered, bullet-headed man dressed in the Navy’s tropical uniform—blue shorts and a blue, short-sleeved jacket over a striped telnyashka shirt—whose cool condescension reminded Katya of the sadistic anatomy lecturer who liked to pluck a student from the ranks and hand her a random bone and demand that she name it and identify the animal it came from.

Captain Chernov was scrupulously polite to Katya but did not bother to hide his scorn for her work, and the collaboration with the Americans and their British allies. He was a war hero who, during the campaign against American libertarian pirates ten years ago, had devised and carried out a daring, spur-of-the-moment raid that had ended with the capture of a particularly bloodthirsty warlord. Popular acclaim meant that the Navy couldn’t cashier him for disregarding the chain of command, so he had been given a medal and promoted sideways to the Survey Corps, where he’d been chafing ever since.

When Katya asked him what kind of problem he was responding to, he studied her with remote amusement, then said, “It is something you might find interesting, if true. The miners claimed that they were being attacked by monsters.”

“Monsters? What kind of monsters?”

“Most likely the American kind,” Captain Chernov said. As usual, he was speaking to a spot somewhere behind her left shoulder, as if addressing the ghost of an authority she herself did not possess. “If there really are monsters, if this is not some Yankee trick, you may be of some help. Until then, do your best to stay out of the way. My men must prepare for trouble.”

The ekranoplan made the two-thousand-kilometer trip in just under five hours. Katya studied the images captured by the drone, sorted them into categories, and made a few preliminary measurements. She ate a sparse lunch alone in the long tube of the mess room (which could double as a field hospital if the need arose), composing a bitter complaint to the IBY committee, the Marine Biology Institute, and the Ministry of Defense, which she knew she would never send. Pick your battles carefully and fight them only in your head, her mother liked to say. No one remembers the righteous who go to war and lose.

The vibration of the turbofans created standing rings in her tumbler of water.

She wondered about the monsters that had supposedly attacked the miners at Makarov Station. The shallow seas of Venus teemed with an extravagance of macrofauna—sunfish, cornet squid, mock turtles, and so on—but only a few large animal species had been discovered on the northern continent settled by the Americans, and the thousands of islands and sea mounts and atolls of the southern hemisphere. So finding a species of carnivore capable of killing a man would be a considerable coup. A swarm of pack-hunting reptiloids. Some kind of super crocodilian. Or perhaps, just perhaps, something as rare and strange as a tiger or a wolf.

She went back to work, counting sunfish, measuring them, tracking the paths of individuals … Trying to squeeze as much data as possible from the truncated observations. At some point, she noticed that the deep drone of the turbofans had diminished to a gentle throbbing. The ekranoplan was afloat again, driven by its auxiliary engine as it nosed through dense billows of fog. Captain Chernov was outside, on the little railed observation deck behind the cockpit, with the chief petty officer. The two men wore pistols on their hips and were watching the long shadow of a shoreline resolve out of the fog: the shore of the mysterious equatorial continent.

Two billion years ago, the last great resurfacing era, vast quantities of molten rock from Venus’s mantle had risen to the surface through long, vertical cracks in the crust. Injections of lava and differential crystallization of minerals had formed an enormous geological basin with distinct layered strata, including reefs of titaniferous magnetite gabbro, and vast quantities of tin and iron. The basin had tilted and eroded and half drowned, leaving only one edge exposed, a long, narrow continent that wrapped around half of Venus’s equator. Most of its volcanic ranges and salt flats and deserts were scorching, waterless, and utterly uninhabitable, but a cold sea current rose at its southern coast, feeding banks of fog that grew during the long day and sustained an ecosystem found nowhere else on Venus. The People’s Republic had established several mining stations there to exploit deposits of titanium and tin ore, copper and silver, platinum and bismuth, and to lay claim to the deserts to the north.

This was the coast that the ekranoplan was approaching, drowned in fog and mystery.

An even, pearlescent light, streaming with particles and tiny transient rainbows in whichever direction Katya happened to look. The close, clammy heat of a Turkish bath wrapping around her like a wet towel. The puttering of the auxiliary motor and the slap of waves unnaturally loud in the muffled hush. And something echoing in the distance: faint, staccato, persistent.

“I see no monsters,” Captain Vladimir Chernov said, turning to Katya. “But I definitely hear something. Do you hear it, too, Doctor? Could you give your professional opinion?”

“It sounds like dogs,” Katya said. “Dogs, barking. Do they have dogs?”

“I don’t believe so. Pigs, yes. To eat their kitchen waste and supply them with fresh pork. They are Ukrainian, the miners here. And all Ukrainians love pork. But if the records are correct, there are no dogs.”

“Well, it sounds more like dogs than pigs. Someone smuggled in their pets, perhaps. Or watchdogs were assigned to this place, and the paperwork was lost or mislaid.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps it is monsters that kill and eat men, and bark like dogs,” Captain Chernov said. A fat pair of binoculars hung from his neck, a symbol of his status, perhaps: they were of no practical use in the fog.

“It would be something new to science,” Katya said, refusing to rise to his bait.

“Science does not yet know everything,” Captain Chernov said. “Isn’t that why you were studying the sunfish, Doctor? Not just to be friends with the Americans, but because you wished to learn something. We are at the edge of an unexplored continent. Perhaps you will learn something here.”

“Or perhaps they are really dogs. American running dogs,” the chief petty officer said.

He was a stocky, grizzled fellow with a scornful gaze who had even less time for Katya than Captain Chernov did. But at least they were direct about their dislike, unlike the chauvinist fossils at the Marine Biology Institute, and it had nothing to do with her being a woman—a woman who asserted her own opinions and refused to recognize her inferiority. No, they resented her presence because the IBY had many enemies in the government, and if its unstable mixture of science and peacenik appeasement blew up, the fallout would contaminate everyone associated with it. Which was why, of course, Katya had been assigned to the sunfish project by her bosses, and why she wanted to make a success of it.

“Dogs, pigs, monsters: we will find out. And we must do it soon,” Captain Chernov told Katya, for once addressing her directly. The ice age of his contempt had somewhat thawed. He was relaxed, almost cheerful. This was Navy work: he was no longer answerable to Katya and the IBY. “If the Americans are not already here, hiding from us or lying in wait, they will be here soon. They claim to have intercepted the distress call. They claim to want to help. There is no airstrip here. The terrain is rough. Too many steep hills and ridges. So everything comes in and goes out by sea. One of our frigates will be here in three days, but one of the American so-called research ships will be here tomorrow.”

Makarov Station, strung along the edge of a natural harbor sheltered by a sandbar, was entirely obscured by the fog: it wasn’t possible to survey it and the surrounding area with drones or lidar. Infrared imaging showed that the buildings, usually air-conditioned, were at ambient temperature. Apart from a man-sized trace perched on a dockside crane there was no sign of the twenty-six people who lived and worked there, or of the monsters that supposedly had attacked them.

The ekranoplan dropped anchor, sounded its siren, sent up a flare that burst in a dim red star high in the fog. There was no answer from the shore, no response on the radio, no reply when the chief petty officer called to the miners through a loudhailer, and no one was waiting at the edge of the long quayside as the landing party motored toward a floating stage in a big inflatable.

Captain Chernov sprang onto the stage and galloped up the steps, pistol drawn, followed by the chief petty officer, the drone pilot Arkadi Sarantsev, and seven seamen—most of the ekranoplan’s crew. Katya followed, her heart hammering in anticipation. When she reached the top of the stairs, sweating in the damp heat, the men had already spread out in a semicircle, menacing the fog with their pistols and carbines. The skeletal outline of a crane, heaps of dark ore, the outlines of a string of small, flat-roofed buildings and a tall radio mast faintly visible beyond. The persistent barking in the distance, tireless as a machine.

Captain Chernov paid no attention to it. He was standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the crane’s scaffold stem. The jut of its long jib was veiled in misty streamers, but it was just possible to make out the shadow of a man at its end. He did not respond when Captain Chernov ordered him to come down and he did not respond when the chief petty officer put a bullet into the steel plating a meter behind his feet. The sound of the shot whanged off across the muffled, fog-bound quay.

Captain Chernov cupped his hands to his mouth. “Next one he puts in your damn leg!”

No response. They all stood looking up at the man. The monotonous barking had not let up, hack-hack-hacking away deep in the fog.

“Take another shot,” Captain Chernov told the chief petty officer.

“I’ll go up there,” Katya said.

“I distinctly remember telling you to keep out of the way,” Captain Chernov said mildly.

“I am medically qualified,” Katya said. It was technically true: she had been given basic first-aid training at Young Pioneer camp. “The poor fellow may be hurt or wounded. He may not be able to climb down without help.”

“He may be an American for all we know,” the chief petty officer said.

“You can bring him down?” Captain Chernov said.

“I can assess him, talk to him. Whether he comes down, that will be up to him,” Katya said, with that airy feeling just before a dive, before she toppled over backward into unknown water. As her mother so often observed, she had a knack of talking herself into trouble.

“No, whether he comes down will be up to you, Doctor,” Captain Chernov said, turning now, favoring her with his thin cool smile. “Don’t disappoint me.”

The steel rungs of the ladder, dripping with condensed moisture, slipped under Katya’s fingers as she climbed, slipped under the tread of her boots. When she reached the little glass-and-metal box of the operator’s cabin, she clung to the handrail and called out, asking the man if he needed help, trying to sound encouraging, friendly. The man did not respond. He lay prone at the far end of the jib, arms wrapped around a steel beam as if around a long-lost lover. There were only ten meters between them, but he did not even turn his head to look at her.

She swore and swung up the steel framework to the top of the jib, trying to ignore the dizzying plunge to the antlike cluster of people below. She called to the man again, asked him to tell her his name, and now he moved, rolling awkwardly to look at her without letting go of the beam. His eyes, sunk deep in dark hollows, seemed to be all pupil.

“You’re safe now,” Katya said, trying to project a confidence she did not feel. “Come toward me. I’ll help you down.”

The man’s mouth worked, but no words emerged. He was young, younger than Katya, and wore blue coveralls and heavy work boots.

“I’ll come to you, then,” Katya said.

But soon as she started to crab toward him, the jib shivering uneasily beneath her, the man humped backward, like a demented caterpillar. She stopped, told him that everything was all right, that he was safe, and he closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side. He was crouched at the very end of the jib now, beside the cable wheel.

Captain Chernov called out, asking why this was taking so long. The man looked down, then looked back at Katya, and slowly rose to his feet, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, balancing at the edge of the foggy void.

“Wait!” she said. “Don’t!”

He did.

Katya closed her eyes. A moment later there was a hard wet sound and a shout of dismay below.

When she reached the ground, Captain Chernov said, “Your treatment worked, Doctor, but unfortunately it killed the patient.”

The son of a bitch must have been working on that quip while he watched her climb down. She said, “He was scared to death.”

“Of you?”

“Of his worst nightmare, I think.”

She was staring at the captain because she did not want to look at the splayed body.

“The crane is twenty meters high,” the chief petty officer said. “Whatever he was scared of, it must have been very big.”

“And it’s still here,” Katya said, pointing in the direction of the distant barking that had not, in all this time, let up.

“You are eager to make a famous discovery. But first we must secure the station,” Captain Chernov said, and detailed two seamen to stay by the boat, told the rest to stick together.

“Look after the doctor, lads,” the chief petty officer said. “She isn’t armed, she can’t run as fast as we can, and she’s probably a lot tastier than your salty hides.”

“There were twenty-six people here,” Katya said. “All men?”

“Of course,” the chief petty officer said. “They were here to work. They didn’t need distraction.”

“All men,” Katya said. “And they didn’t do too well, did they?”

They swept through the buildings. Dormitories. A mess hall. Offices. Stores. Two generators purring in a shack constructed from concrete blocks and corrugated iron. An assay lab and a small clinic. A cold store with three bodies wrapped in black plastic sheeting. One had been badly mangled in some accident; the other two looked like suicides—a ligature of electrical cable around the neck, slashed wrists. Five more dead men were sprawled behind one of the dormitory huts, hands bound, chests torn by what appeared to be gunshot wounds, bullet holes in the hut’s plank wall. Another body sprawled at the foot of the radio mast. His neck was broken, and Katya suggested that he had fallen while climbing.

“Climbing to escape from monsters, like your patient on the crane?” Captain Chernov said. “Or perhaps trying to escape from Americans who shot his friends.”

“Perhaps they all went stir-crazy in this damn fog,” the chief petty officer said. “There was a quarrel. It got out of hand …”

“Something drove them mad, perhaps,” Captain Chernov said thoughtfully.

The prefab buildings were empty although there were signs that people had left with some haste. Plates of food rotting on tables in the mess, papers scattered on the floor of the office, a record rotating on a gramophone in one of the dormitory huts, making an eerie scratching click until Captain Chernov lifted the needle. The gun locker was open and empty, but apart from the five men who had been lined up and shot there was no sign of any struggle, no blood spray, no bullet holes anywhere else. And no sign of the sixteen men still unaccounted for.

“They ran off, or they were taken prisoner,” Captain Chernov said. “If they ran off, we will find them. If they were taken prisoner, we will find the Americans who did it.”

“With respect, I don’t think this was anything to do with Americans,” Katya said.

“The so-called libertarians took hostages for ransom when they attacked our trawlers and merchant ships,” Captain Chernov said. “And executed them when no ransom was paid. What happened here, perhaps, was caused by some kind of psychological-war weapon. A gas, a volatile drug. After the men were driven mad by it, the Americans walked in, shot the few still able to resist, and took the rest prisoner. I see you do not like this story, Doctor. Well, if you have a better idea about what happened here, I should like to hear it.”

“I don’t have enough evidence to form a hypothesis,” Katya said, and realized that it sounded stiff and priggish and defensive.

The captain smiled. He was having fun with her. “You hope to find monsters. You hope for fame. Very well. Let’s go look for them.”

Katya trailed after the party of seamen as Captain Chernov and the chief petty officer led them along the quayside, past pyramidal heaps of ore, past a row of articulated dump trucks: powerful machines with six-wheel drive and rugged tires as tall as a person. They moved slowly and cautiously through the fog, checking under the trucks, checking shipping containers and stacks of empty crates. Arkadi Sarantsev hung back with Katya, asking her if she really thought monsters had attacked the station, if they were right now feeding on men they had killed.

“That’s what the captain thinks I think,” Katya said.

“Do you think he is wrong, about something driving the men crazy?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it was something to do with the isolation,” Katya said. “That, and the fog.”

“But not, you think, Americans,” Arkadi Sarantsev said.

He had a nice smile and a cool attitude, had knotted a red handkerchief at the throat of his telnyashka shirt. He plucked a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and offered it to Katya; when she refused with a shake of her head, he put the pack to his lips, plucked out a cigarette, and lit it with a heavy petrol lighter fashioned from a .50 cal cartridge case.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think that your captain was looking for an excuse to take on the American research ship,” she said.

“The captain’s father was one of the pioneer settlers,” Arkadi said. “We all resent the capitalists, with their nuclear rockets and supercomputers and frontier mentality, but the pioneer families especially resent them. As far as the captain is concerned, their offer of help is a personal insult.”

Katya had once sort of dated a Navy diver, who one drunken night had told her how a friend of his had come to the surface too quickly because his dive computer had malfunctioned. He had been stricken with the bends, screaming with the pain of nitrogen bubbles in his joints, fed vodka by his mates because they had no way of treating him. Their patrol boat had been making a hopeless dash to the nearest port when an American frigate which had intercepted its call for help had caught up with it and had taken off the stricken man and treated him in its decompression chamber. Katya’s boyfriend had tried to make it into a joke, saying that his friend had not only beaten the bends but had discovered a tremendous hangover cure into the bargain, but it was the usual sad story of crazy Russian machismo combined with a massive inferiority complex.

She said to Arkadi, “I know your captain took things very personally in the war against the libertarians.”

“He disobeyed orders when he staged that raid, yes. But he captured an important warlord and his entourage, and also rescued more than twenty hostages.”

She had to smile at Arkadi’s sudden passion. “You think he’s a hero.”

“One time, two years ago, we had the job of visiting a small island close to the South Pole,” Arkadi said. “Very remote, very desolate. No one lives there, but it is important we have a claim on it. A previous expedition set up a beacon and also landed goats there. The idea was that they would breed and provide a source of fresh meat to any ships that passed by. We were tasked to clean the beacon’s solar panels and replace its storage battery, and also to find out how the goats were doing.”

“I can imagine what Captain Chernov thought about that.”

“He believed that he was keeping the borders of the People’s Republic safe,” Arkadi said. “That is what he told us, at any rate. Well, a small party of us land. We cannot find any trace of the goats. Not so much as a bone. There are pancake crabs everywhere, though, so we think the goats died and the crabs ate them. The island is a volcanic cone, extinct. Black rocks, tangles of thorny bushes, and everywhere pancake crabs. Watching us from under stones, creeping close to us whenever we stop as we climb to where the beacon was placed.

“All the way around the top of the island’s cone there is a thick belt of feather palms. Smaller than the ones on the Big Island, but still much taller than anything else growing there. And there are pancake crabs in the palms. As we make our way through them, the crabs drop on us. They stick to our skin with those suckers they have, we have to prize them off. It is disgusting, but we do not think it dangerous. At the top, there is a caldera, a deep funnel with a lake at the bottom. We find the beacon and do our work. We rest up, and a couple of idiots roll a boulder over the edge. It drops into the lake far below and makes a big splash. And after the ripples die away, there is another splash, more ripples. As if something had woken down there.”

“You found a monster?”

“We did not see anything. Just the splash and the ripples. And we did not have any way of climbing down. So we start back down, and the wind changes direction, and it begins to rain. And then two of us become sick. An allergic reaction to the pancake crabs, we find out later. It rains harder. Rain blowing sideways on the wind. And when we get to the inlet where we left the boat, we find big waves rolling in and the boat has floated off, is riding on the waves at the mouth of the inlet. Captain Chernov strips off and swims out to the boat, but he can’t bring it near the rocks where the rest of us are waiting because the waves are too fierce. And by now the two sick men are very sick indeed, and they can’t swim out. So he motors off to the ekranoplan and comes back with a rocket line, shoots it from boat to shore, and uses it to swing the sick men above the waves to the boat, and everyone is saved.”

“What about the monster?”

“We didn’t go back to look. But while we wait to be rescued, we have some bad thoughts about it. Imagine it creeping up the cliffs inside the caldera, creeping toward where we are sheltering … But the point is, whatever they say about the captain, he is not a monster. He did the right thing, in the war, and the brass punished him because he made them look bad. Listen to that. It isn’t dogs, is it? It is in no way any kind of dog.”

“It doesn’t sound like pigs, either,” Katya said.

The monotonous barking was loud and close now, coming from somewhere beyond a low rise crowned with a clump of bottlebrush trees. Katya and Arkadi watched as Captain Chernov and three seamen made a forking run, passing left and right around the trees, disappearing into streaming whiteness.

Two minutes passed. Three. No shots. No shouts. Katya’s heart beat high as she strained to see into the fog. She badly wanted to know what was making that noise, but her hindbrain was telling her to run far and run fast. Arkadi lit another cigarette, and Katya pretended that she didn’t see the flame of his lighter trembling when he applied it. The barking continued without pause. Eventually one of the seamen appeared on top of the ridge, a shadowy figure in the haze, scissoring his arms over his head to indicate the all clear.

There was a vegetable garden on the other side of the ridge, neat rows of potatoes and cabbage enclosed by a double fence of wire mesh to keep out pancake crabs, green leaves vivid and alien against the purples of the belt of native scrub beyond. And there was a paddock of bare earth inside a fence of wooden stakes and wire where two pigs lay in a muddy wallow, flanks heaving as they hacked and barked. Each time they coughed, bloody froth burst from their muzzles. The bodies of three other pigs lay swollen and rotting nearby, avid crowds of pancake crabs jostling and burrowing into them. Katya caught a strong whiff of ripe decay as she leaned against the fence. It seemed to tint the fog with the monochrome hue of grief.

“Here are your monsters, Doctor,” Captain Chernov told her. “Would you care to examine them?”

The chief petty officer wanted to put the pigs out of their misery. Katya said that they should try to find out what had infected them first and was surprised when Captain Chernov agreed.

“This sickness could be a reaction to a nerve agent,” he said.

“Or something they caught from the local biota,” Katya said.

“Native diseases do not infect people,” Captain Chernov said. “Or pigs.”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Katya said. “But life on Earth and Venus shares the same genetic code and presumably the same common ancestor. As far as Venusian viruses and bacteria are concerned, people and pigs are no more than new sets of mucous membranes to be penetrated, new masses of cytoplasm to be exploited and subverted.”

“First you hope to find monsters,” Captain Chernov said. “Now you hope to find the Venusian flu. Your expectations are dwindling, Doctor. If you want to make yourself useful, help Mr. Sarantsev search the offices for diaries, logs, any records that might reveal what has happened. Meanwhile, I must look for the missing miners although I am pretty sure I will not find them.”

“Because the Americans took them?”

“I am sure that like all scientists, you believe in logic. And logic tells us that if they are not here, they must be somewhere else,” Captain Chernov said, and told Arkadi to make sure that Dr. Ignatova did not get into any trouble, and roared off with the rest of his men toward the open-cast mine in two trucks.

Katya found a log in the station’s small clinic, found an entry three weeks old that noted two men displaying symptoms of a flulike infection: high temperatures, involuntary movements of the arms and legs, night sweats, recovery within twenty-four hours. By then, more men had become infected. It had swiftly passed through the camp, and everyone appeared to have succumbed, including the station’s chemist, who doubled as its medical officer. In the assay lab, Katya found a photograph showing him standing with his two teenage daughters in front of the First Footstep monument on Big Island: a gangling, sandy-haired man with heavy-framed glasses and a high forehead. She had seen him before. He was one of the men who had been shot to death. His name was Georgi Zhzhyonov.

For a week after the last men came down with what he called twenty-four-hour flu, he’d made only routine notes in his log. Then there was a terse entry about a suicide—a man had hanged himself. Another man walked in front of a truck. More entries: fistfights, a nonfatal stabbing, broken bones due to drunkenness. Two men disappeared one night; three the next. One was found clinging to the top of a tall tree and brought down. The next day he was found dead, his wrists slashed open. A man hanged himself; four others disappeared. The last note, in Georgi Zhzhyonov’s neat, slanting script, read I suffer from the most vivid and peculiar dreams.

Katya found the forms certifying the deaths of the suicides, with notes on bloodwork. Georgi Zhzhyonov had run samples through his gas spectrometer, looking for heavy metals and toxins, finding only trace levels of tin and titanium, well within expected limits. He had also examined the blood of two pigs. Katya felt a chill at the base of her spine. The men had become ill; the pigs had become ill; Georgi Zhzhyonov had been trying to find a link. And because he was a metallurgist, he had used the tools of his trade.

There was a geological map on one wall of his little lab. Katya studied it carefully. The broad curve of the shoreline with sandbars running parallel to it. A black rectangle marking the site of the station. A series of steeply contoured ridges rising behind, with red stipplings indicating known deposits of ore. The site of the open-cast mine was marked on the first ridge by a crosshatched rectangle. She ran her finger along the top of the ridge, noting the high spots.

Arkadi Sarantsev, searching the disordered office of the mining station’s commandant, had made his own discovery.

“Fish,” he told Katya.

“Fish?”

“A lot of fish.” Arkadi waggled a video disc. “Luckily for us, the commandant liked to make home movies.”

It was short, choppily edited. Panning shots across windrows of black fish on a sandbar that faded into fog, black fish rising and falling on shallow waves. A zoom shot closing on fish shimmying and leaping out of the water, landing on fish already dead or dying. Skinny, armor-plated fish with pale gill ruffs and bulbous eyes. A close-up that included the cameraman’s boots, showing several fish writhing in circles, snapping at their own tails. Men scooping fish into buckets, tipping the buckets into oil drums in the well of a skiff. Men shoveling fish into the water, men throwing fish at each other. A small bulldozer rolling back and forth in the fog, turning up combers of sand and fish and pushing them into the water. Waves rolling in, black with blood, agitated by the splashing of scavengers come to feed.

Katya insisted on replaying the scenes of the men at work. Ten men, twenty, twenty-five. And the cameraman, the commandant, made twenty-six. Everyone in the mining station had joined in the macabre beach party, and none of them had worn protective clothing. Most were dressed in bathing trunks and flip-flops; several were buck naked.

“When was this?” she said.

“Four weeks ago,” Arkadi said.

“And a week later, the men started to become sick,” she said, and gave a quick account of Georgi Zhzhyonov’s notes. The suicides, the disappearances, the cryptic note about dreams.

Arkadi showed her the commandant’s diary. Notes on patrols sent to search the forest behind the station, of sightings of men or man-shaped animals, of strange noises. Toward the end, the commandant’s handwriting degenerated to a jagged scrawl. The last entry consisted of a few indecipherable words and drawings of skulls, fanged devil faces, daggers dripping blood.

“So you think it was the fish,” Arkadi said. “The fish infected them, or they ate the fish and it made them sick. Sick in the body and in the head.”

“It may be slightly more complicated than that,” Katya said. “I think they fed the pigs with some of the fish. I need to examine them.”

She found boxes of vinyl gloves in the little lab and face masks she soaked in bleach. It wasn’t much protection, but it was the best she could manage. She didn’t want to get close to the pigs, not without wearing a full contamination suit, so she and Arkadi rigged a sampler from a scaffold pole and a cup taped to the end, and, after some maneuvering, managed to collect a draft of froth from one of them. She treated it like plutonium, carefully tipping it into a plastic bottle and double-bagging the bottle.

She had noticed no less than six microscopes stacked in unopened boxes in the lab. No doubt the result of the same kind of supply error in central stores that had packed the ekranoplan’s stores with tins of no other kind of soup but pumpkin. She set one up on the knife-scarred butcher’s table in the kitchen of the mess, then used a rolling pin to knock out a window.

“Six microscopes,” she told Arkadi, “but not one microscope slide.”

She plucked a small splinter of window glass, put on a fresh set of vinyl gloves, adjusted her mask, smeared a drop of pig sputum on the splinter and set it on the platform of the microscope, and bent over it and adjusted the focus knob until the smear swam into focus.

Nothing.

She swept the platform on which the splinter was clamped back and forth, fingertips sweating on the vernier knobs, on the fine-focus knob, feeling a touch of the funk she remembered from undergraduate practical classes when she’d failed to see the thing she was meant to see.

“What do you see?” Arkadi said.

“Nothing. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

She had explained her idea on the way to sample the stricken pig’s sputum, explained that Georgi Zhzhyonov had been on the right track but he had been looking in the wrong place. On Earth, she told Arkadi, there were diseases passed from animals to humans. Zoonoses. It was possible that the brain-burning flu was one such. The miners had fed their pigs with raw fish—all that free protein, willingly throwing itself ashore—and an infection carried by the fish had flourished in the animals. They had become reaction vessels, growing ill, coughing up infected sputum. Perhaps the man who fed the pigs had become ill first, then had infected everyone else. Or perhaps the men had become infected after eating undercooked pork. Katya had been hoping that it was some kind of parasite. Something she could see under the microscope. Worms. Fungal cells. Spores. Cysts.

“Something you could show the captain,” Arkadi said.

He was a quick study.

“It could be a bacterium,” Katya said. “Or a virus. Viruses are generally not much bigger than the wavelength of visible light, so hard to see with a conventional microscope like this. I’ll find out exactly what it is when I get the samples to a fully equipped lab, but it has to be something native. Something that affects the behavior of its host. It made the fish beach themselves. It made the miners hallucinate. Made them believe that they were being attacked. Made some of them kill themselves. Made some of them kill their friends. I think the rest ran off into the countryside.”

“But you can’t prove it.”

“Not here. Not yet. Unless Captain Chernov has found the missing men.”

He hadn’t. His search party had scoured the strip mine from one end to the other and returned to the station with two bodies they had found at the base of a vertical rock face, but there was no sign of the rest—six by Katya’s count. Captain Chernov was convinced that they had been captured or killed by raiders, but listened to Katya’s précis of Georgi Zhzhyonov’s notes and watched the video.

At the end, he said, “The pigs became sick, the men became sick. And you want to link them with this—what did you call it?”

“A zoonosis,” Katya said.

“But you have no proof.”

“There is the timing. The men started to become sick a week after the fish washed up. If they fed some of the fish to the pigs, it’s long enough for an infection to develop.”

“The man on the crane, was he coughing? No: he was crazy. And the dead men we found—they died from their own hand, or from bullets. Not some parasite.”

“Men and pigs are similar but not identical—”

“The pigs might have caught some illness. Maybe from the fish, why not? But what happened to the men is different. It is clear that their minds were affected.”

“On Earth, there are many examples of parasites that alter the behavior of their hosts,” Katya said.

“We are not on Earth,” Captain Chernov said. “And this is nothing to do with parasites. The men were driven mad, that is clear. But by what? I think it could very well be the result of the testing of some kind of psychological-war weapon. A poison gas, perhaps. A gas that does not kill but alters the mind. The Americans deployed it here, in this remote place, observed the results, then captured the survivors. And now they return, pretending to help, but really wanting to capture us, in case we have discovered evidence of what they did. And your talk of a disease could help them, Doctor. Have you thought of that? Suppose the Americans claim that this was due to a native disease that infects people? Suppose they present false evidence to back up their story? We would have to quarantine this station and perhaps evacuate the others. Leave the coast open for the Americans to claim. Well, we will not run. We will defend this place. We will engage the enemy. We will uncover the truth about the atrocity they committed here. Do that for me, Doctor. Find the truth. Not fairy tales.”

He would not look at the map, would not listen to Katya’s idea about where the last of the miners could be hiding. He had worked up a story that satisfied his prejudices, and he was not going to change his mind. The enemy had done this; they were returning to the scene of the crime; they must be punished.

The chief petty officer and two seamen were left to guard the station; everyone else went back to the ekranoplan. Katya wasn’t confined to her cabin, but the hatches to the observation deck and the wings were locked down, and Captain Chernov made it clear that the bridges were off-limits. She spent a little time writing up a report, trying to keep it as dispassionate as possible. She wasn’t sure if anyone would read it, but she had to put down the facts and her own conclusions.

Overhead, something rumbled and whined. She wondered if it was something to do with the missile launch tubes mounted on the top of the ekranoplan.

When she was finished, she couldn’t stay in her cabin. The ekranoplan was full of restless activity. Men clattering up and down ladders, along companionways. Loud voices. A general excitement. Three seamen cleaning carbines in the mess hall ignored Katya as she pottered in the galley, ignored her when she left, carrying two mugs of tea.

She found Arkadi Sarantsev in the fire-control bay, handed him one of the mugs. He told her that Captain Chernov had reported to Central Command in Kosmograd, and they had taken him seriously. A three-hundred-kilometer exclusion zone had been declared along the coast, and all American and British vessels had been ordered to leave it. The Americans had lodged a formal protest and were sending two frigates to back up their research vessel, which had turned around fifty kilometers from shore, and was heading away. Arkadi brought up the missile guidance system’s radar on the big central screen: the long line of the coast, the hard green dot of the research vessel with a little block of white figures beside it.

“We are waiting for clearance to engage,” he said.

Katya felt a fluttering agitation in her blood. “To fire missiles at it?”

Arkadi sipped from his mug of tea. “To head out and capture it. The captain believes that it carries evidence of a psy-war attack on the station, and Central Command is discussing that idea.”

“He’ll attack anyway, won’t he? Like he did before. Except this time he could start a war.”

“He will do the right thing.”

“You know there was no American plot. You know that the miners became infected with something that drove them crazy. You know the survivors are hiding, like the poor man up in the crane.”

Arkadi studied her for a moment, with a look of regret. “We are friends, you and I. But I am also an officer of the Navy of the People’s Republic, and I serve under the man who saved my life,” he said, and pulled aside the collar of his striped telnyashka shirt to show a white wheal on his shoulder. “I was one of those who had an allergic reaction to pancake-crab spit, on that island.”

“So you won’t help me,” Katya said.

“I advise you to let us do our work.”

“That’s what I thought,” Katya said. “But I had to ask because I’m not sure if I can do this alone.”

Arkadi’s eyes widened and he dropped his mug of tea and raised his hand. Too late. Katya whacked him on the side of his head with the sock stuffed with dried beans, whacked him again, and his eyes rolled back and he slid out of his chair and fell to the floor. She ransacked his pockets and found a set of keys, then laid him on his side, in the recovery position, and headed toward the nearest hatch.

No one saw her drop from one of the wings into the cool water—a drop higher than she’d expected, plunging her a good meter below the surface. And although her entire skin tingled with anticipation as she swam to shore, no one raised the alarm or shot at her. She was a strong swimmer: she had met the Navy diver when he had noticed her in the pool of the spa in the Druzhba sanatorium, high in the mountains of Big Island. Wearing only her underwear, she crested confidently through the cool, calm water, her clothes and shoes in a bag belted to her waist. The fog’s vaporous ceiling hung about a meter over the surface; fog drew a veil all around her. It was as if she were swimming in a private bubble.

As she neared the quay, she heard the barking of the pigs, and, with a pang of regret, wished that she had asked Arkadi to shoot them after she had taken her sample. But he would have probably refused because Captain Chernov wanted to keep them alive to prove his ridiculous theory.

She hoped Arkadi wouldn’t get into trouble because she had stolen his keys. She hoped he would understand why she’d done it. She hoped he would forgive her.

No one challenged her when she climbed onto the quay. She ran past the heap of ore to the parked trucks and paused, breathing hard, listening. Nothing but the labored bark of the poor pigs. No shouts or sirens, no warning shots. She squeezed water from her hair and knotted it in a loose ponytail, pulled on her shirt and cargo pants and shoes, and climbed into the cab of the truck at the far end of the row. She’d driven heavy vehicles like it when, in the long vacation at the end of her first university year, she’d worked at the construction site for the sports center her mother had designed. Power steering, synchromesh gears, no problem. No one challenged her when she pressed the start button and the big engine coughed into life, but as she drove off she saw in the side mirrors a man chasing after her, waving frantically as he fell behind and vanished into the fog.

The truck rode easily and smoothly up a winding, graded road. Perched in the high, roomy cab, cool air blasting out of the air-conditioning, her clothes drying stiffly, Katya drove as fast as she dared in the fog, navigating by the GPS map in the dashboard screen and red lights set on posts at twenty-meter intervals on either side of the road. A never-ending chain of stars appearing out of the fog, drifting past, vanishing.

She imagined men running for the trucks, speeding after her. Nothing showed in the side mirrors, but visibility was down to less than twenty meters. She wouldn’t know she was being chased until they were right on the tail of the truck’s hopper.

The road grew steeper. She shifted down, shifted down again, and at last it topped out. Trying to match the GPS map with reality, she drove past a pair of bulldozers, some kind of mobile conveyer belt, and a string of prefab huts before a terraced cliff horizontally striped with dark ore deposits loomed out of the fog. She turned right, driving across packed dirt, skirting around a spoil heap that rose into streaming whiteness, past the tower and hoppers of a screening plant. Then a faint red light appeared to her left and she turned toward it, realizing with tremendous relief that she had found the road that led to the top of the ridge.

It switchbacked up steep, wooded slopes. Trees grew on either side, stabbing up into the fog. Some were a little like conifers, or a child’s drawing of conifers: stiff radial branches strung with puffballs of fine needles that condensed water droplets from the fog. Others were hung with what looked like tattered sails, or bunches of ragged, velvety straps that sparkled with condensation in the truck’s headlights. Puffballs and straps and sails were tinted deep purple—Venusian plants used a pigment similar to rhodopsin to capture light for photosynthesis. Fat cushions of black moss saddled between the trees. Everything was dripping wet.

A shape loomed out of the fog: a yellow, articulated dump truck exactly like the one she was driving, tipped nose down in the deep ditch at the side of the road. She slowed as she went past, craning to look inside the truck’s cab, seeing that it was empty and feeling a measure of relief: feeling that she was on the right track.

The oppressive shroud of the fog began to lift and break up into streamers caught amongst branches and sails, and she drove on in pewter light, trees thinning to scattered clumps with rough scrub between. The road turned, and gave out abruptly, and a truck was slewed at its end.

The men had come here, all right. Trying to escape the monsters in their heads by driving out of the fog to the place they came to play and relax.

Katya drove past the truck, drove across a rough meadow, past a barbecue pit and picnic tables, jolting on up a steepening slope until even in its lowest gear the truck could climb no farther.

She switched off the motor and swung out of the cab, looked back at the way she had come. A pure white sea stretched toward the horizon, seamlessly melding with the ivory dome of the planet’s permanent cloud cover. The sun was a bright smear low in the east. In less than twenty days, it would set at this latitude, and the long night—117 days long—would begin. Forty kilometers above, a lightning storm flashed and flickered under the cloudroof: she heard the distant, dull percussion of thunder, saw thin, shadowy twists of falling rain that would evaporate before they hit the ground.

There was still no sign of pursuit, but she did not doubt that she was being followed and began to climb toward the top of the ridge. Steep, stony slopes sparsely stubbled with purple vegetation. Squat vases, skull-sized puffballs, clumps of stiff, thorny whips or tall plumes. The air was very still, weighted with sultry heat. Long shadows tangled everywhere.

She was sweating hard, out of breath, her pulse hammering in her ears, when at last she reached the top of the ridge and saw the crests of further ridges rising above the fog, parallel rakes stretching toward the distant prospect of a stark mountain range, the beginning of the desert interior. Ahead of her, the broad ridge ran out toward a high prow crowned with a copse of trees.

A horn blared far below. She felt a spike of alarm, saw a yellow dump truck draw up beside hers, saw three men spill from it.

As she jogged toward the copse of trees, a speck materialized in the distance, scooting above the shadow it cast on the restless sea of fog, cutting through wisps of drifting vapor, rising as it tracked toward her. It was one of the ekranoplan’s drones, a chunky quadrocopter like a garbage-can lid pierced by a cross, with a caged rotor at the end of each bar of the cross. Its cluster of cameras glinted as it buzzed past her and turned and came back, flying low and fast, a homicidal Frisbee aimed at her head.

She dropped flat, felt the backwash of the drone’s fans blow over her, pushed to her feet as the quadrocopter curved around and shot toward her again, and ran toward a clump of thorns at the edge of a steep drop. She broke off one of the dead canes in the core of the clump and swung it at the drone, and the machine veered sideways and made a wide turn and came back toward her, moving in cautious, erratic spurts, halting a few meters away.

There was a metallic clatter and a voice said, “Stay where you are, Doctor. Wait for my men.”

“Is that you, Captain? If you care to follow me, I’ll lead you to the missing miners.”

“You disobeyed a direct order, Doctor. But if you come back now, I’ll overlook your transgression.”

“They climbed up here, looking for a place where they’d be safe,” Katya said, and pointed toward the trees.

The quadrocopter drone tilted and shot forward, and she jumped over the edge and plowed down the steep slope in a cloud of dust and small stones, fetching up breathless and bleeding in a clump of stiff purple plumes. She had lost the thorn cane. The drone was falling toward her, and she snapped off a plume and thrust it like a spear into one of the machine’s fans.

There was a grinding noise and a stinging blizzard of shards and splinters sprayed around her and the drone spun past, canted at a steep angle. It tried to turn back toward Katya, and the mismatched thrust of its fans spun it in a death spiral and it struck a shelf of rock and clattered away down the slope, bouncing and shedding parts.

The three men climbing toward her paused as the wreckage of the drone spun past, then started to climb again.

It took all of Katya’s strength to scramble back up the slope. She paused at the top, her pulse drumming in her skull, and blotted sweat and blood from her eyes—flying splinters had badly cut her face. The men were much closer now. The chief petty officer shouted something to her, and she turned and limped along the crest of the ridge, hot pain knifing in one ankle. Hot air clamped around her like a fever sheet; the world contracted to the patch of stony dirt directly in front of her feet. She scrambled up a steep gully, mostly on all fours, only realized that she reached the top when the shadows of the trees fell across her.

They were rooted amongst black boulders, upright trunks soaring skyward, stiff horizontal branches clad in bunches of purple needles. A man lay on his back on a dry litter of fallen needles, eyes shrunken in their sockets, cracked lips flecked with froth. Katya thought he was dead, but then he turned his head toward her and started to tremble and whimper.

Both his legs were broken. She could see bone sticking out of the shin of his torn trousers. A rifle lay some way off. She supposed that he’d dropped it when he’d fallen.

She knelt beside him and took one of his hands and asked him where his friends were. His eyes rolled back. She thought he had fainted, then she understood, and looked up. And saw small shadows high up in the jutting branches, half-hidden by puffball clusters of needles. Atavistic apes clinging to the safety of their perches.

Katya held on to the man’s hand as the chief petty officer and two seamen stepped toward her.

“I don’t know why he didn’t have you killed,” her mother said.

“Chernov didn’t have a plan,” Katya said. “He had a fixation, a belief that everything that he saw was the result of some fiendish American plot. He was trying to stop me, yes, but he was also trying to rescue me from what he believed to be my own foolishness. When his men saw that I had found the miners, that was the end of it.”

“I suppose we should for once be grateful for the rigid code of honor men value so highly.”

“Arkadi called him a hero. And he acted like one.”

“And now you are the hero. My daughter, who saved the world from war.”

“From a stupid skirmish created by that rigid code of honor. And I was wrong about too many things to qualify as any kind of hero. I was wrong about what infected the miners, to begin with.”

They were talking over lunch. Katya and the crew of the ekranoplan had just been released from quarantine, and her mother had whisked her away from the scrum of reporters and onlookers and a crew from the state TV news to the calm of the luncheon room of the Engineers’ Union, with its views across the simmering basin of Kosmograd and the blue curve of Crater Bay.

The other diners were openly staring at them, and not, for once, because they were the only two women in the room. Katya wore the shirt and cargo pants in which she’d been released; her mother wore a severely cut white suit that emphasized her slim figure, and her trademark, red-framed glasses.

“You weren’t wrong, dear,” she said. “The men had been infected by something that drove them mad.”

“But it wasn’t a bug or a parasite. And it didn’t have anything to do with the pigs. And we have only circumstantial evidence that it had anything to do with the fish.”

It had taken several weeks of tests in the naval hospital to determine that the miners had been infected by a kind of prion: an infectious agent that closely resembled a misfolded version of a protein found in neurons in the amygdala, the small subcortical structure in the brain that regulated both fear and pleasure responses. The prion catalyzed the misfolding of those proteins, creating an imbalance of neurotransmitters and triggering an exaggerated version of the fight-or-flight reaction and release of massive amounts of adrenaline and other hormones. The psychotic breaks and hallucinations suffered by the miners had been attempts to rationalize uncontrollable emotional thunderstorms.

Katya wanted very much to prove that the prion had been present in the blood of the fish which had beached themselves. As for the pigs, they had been infected by a parasitic threadworm, but it had only affected their respiratory systems and did not seem to be transmissible to humans. She had been right in thinking that the miners’ madness was due to an infection, but had gotten every detail wrong because she had based her ideas on terrestrial examples. She had made the mistake of arguing from analogy, of trying to map stories from Earth on the actuality of Venus, and the fit had been imperfect.

“I saw two different things,” she told her mother, “and tried to make them part of the same story. Captain Chernov was right about that, at least.”

“He was wrong about everything else. And you are too hard on yourself,” her mother said fondly.

“I wonder where I got that from?”

“Can the poor men you rescued be cured?”

“They’re under heavy sedation and undergoing cognitive therapy. They’re no longer scared to death, but purging the prions from their brains won’t be easy.”

“It sounds as if you have found a new project.”

“I’m wondering if it’s a general problem,” Katya said. “This particular prion caused a gross behavioral change, but there may be others that have more subtle effects. We think that we are separate from the biosphere of Venus, yet it is clear that we are not. All of us, Russians, Americans, British, we have more in common with each other than with the people from our homelands. We came from Earth, but we are all Venusians now. Venus is in our blood, and our minds.”

“So you have a new research topic, and a new way of getting into trouble,” her mother said. “What about this new man of yours?”

“We’re taking it slowly. He forgave me, at least, for giving him a bad concussion and injuring his pride.”

Although Arkadi had said, the first time they had met in quarantine, that if he had been piloting the drone, he would have had no problem returning the favor.

“A man who puts love before pride,” her mother said. “Now there’s a lovely example of a new way of thinking.”