Old Venus

A Planet Called Desire

GWYNETH JONES

1. JOHN FORREST, ADVENTURER

THE LABORATORY WAS ON AN UPPER FLOOR. ITS WIDE WINDOWS looked out, across the landscaped grounds of the Foundation, to the Atlantic Ocean. One brilliant star, bright as a tiny full moon, shone above the horizon, glittering in the afterwash of sunset.

“My grandfather’s people called her Hawa,” said the scientist.

“Is that a Dogon term, PoTolo?” asked John Forrest: a big man, fit and tanned, past forty but in excellent shape. He wore a neatly trimmed beard and moustache; his vigorous red-brown hair brushed back and a little long; his challenging eyes were an opaque dark blue. “You’re Dogon, aren’t you?”

They were alone in the lab: alone in the building aside from a few security guards. Dr. Seven PoTolo, slight and dark, fragile and very young-looking beside the magnate, was uncomfortable with the situation, but there was nothing he could do. Mr. Forrest, the multibillionaire, celebrity entrepreneur/philanthropist, environmentalist, lover of life-threatening he-man stunts, owned the Foundation outright. His billions financed PoTolo’s work, and he was ruthless with any hint of opposition.

PoTolo shook his head. “I’m afraid my ancestry is mixed: Cameroon is a melting pot. My maternal grandfather spoke one of the vanishing languages of the Coast. But ‘hawa’ is a loan-word. I think it’s Arabic, and means desire.”

“Sensual desire, yes,” agreed Forrest. “The temptation of Eve.”

He turned to survey the untried experimental apparatus.

“What will conditions be like?”

“Conditions on the surface could be remarkably Earthlike,” said PoTolo. “The tectonic-plate system hasn’t yet broken down, the oceans haven’t boiled away, atmospheric pressure hasn’t started to skyrocket, the atmosphere is oxygenated. Rotation should be speedier too. Much longer than our twenty-four-hour cycle, but a day and a night won’t last a local year …”

Forrest studied the rig. Most of it was indecipherable, aside from the scanning gate and biomedical monitors introduced for his benefit. A black globe with an oily sheen, clutched in robotic grippers inside a clear chamber, caught his eye: reminding him somehow of the business part of a nuclear reactor.

“But no guarantees,” he remarked, dryly.

“No guarantees … Mr. Forrest, you have signed your life away. Neither your heirs, nor any other interested parties, will have any legal recourse if you fail to return. But the risks are outrageous. Won’t you reconsider?”

“Consider what?” Forrest’s muddy blue eyes blazed. “Living out my life in some protected enclave of a world I’d rather go blind than see? The trees are dying, the oceans are poisoned. We’re choking on our own emissions, in the midst of a mass extinction caused by our numbers, while sleepwalking into a Third World War! No, I will not reconsider. Don’t tell me about risk. I know about risk!”

PoTolo nodded carefully, more physically intimidated than he liked to admit by this big rich white man, disinhibited by great power and famous for his reckless temper.

“My apologies. Shall we proceed?”

“I take nothing? No helmet full of gizmos, no homing beacon?”

“Only the capsule you swallowed. If conditions are as we hope, the probe will be retrieved, bringing you along with it. There’ll be an interval, I can’t tell you exactly how long, the variables are complex. You don’t have to do anything. You can move around, admire the scenery, then suddenly, you’ll be back here.”

“Amusing, if I’m in the middle of a conversation … One more question. You’ve staked your career on this, PoTolo, as much as I’m staking my life. What’s in it for you?”

“Habitable zones,” said the scientist. “Ancient Venus is, in effect, our nearest accessible exoplanet. If we can confirm the existence in space-time of the Venusian habitable zone we’ve detected, that’s a major confirmation of our ability to identify viable alternate Earths. We may not be able to use this method to send probes across the light-years, to distant systems; there may be insuperable barriers to that, but—”

“Bullshit. Your motive was glory, and the glory is mine now.” Forrest grinned. “You lose, I win. That’s what I do, PoTolo. I see an opportunity, and I take it.”

“Are you quite ready, Mr. Forrest?”

“I am.”

Forrest assumed the position, standing in the gate, arms loosely by his sides. He turned his head for a last glance at that bright star. The world disappeared.

He stood in a rosy, green-tinged twilight, surrounded by trees. Most seemed young, some had boles thicker than his body. Fronds like hanging moss hung around him; the ground underfoot was springy and a little uncertain, as if composed entirely of supple, matted roots. No glimpse of sky. The air was still, neither warm nor cold; the silence was absolute, uncanny. He looked at himself, checked the contents of belt loops and pockets. He was dressed as he had been in West Africa, complete with a sturdy, familiar, outdoors kit. This struck him as very strange, suddenly, but why not? What is a body but a suit of clothes, another layer of the mind’s adornment? And his body seemed to have made the trip. Or the translation, or whatever you called it. No pack. PoTolo had told him he couldn’t carry a pack.

PoTolo!

The name rang like a bell, reminding him just what had happened. What an extraordinary feat! He took a few steps, in one direction, then another: keeping himself oriented on the drop zone. Pity he didn’t have a ballpark figure for the “interval.” Ten minutes or ten hours? How far was it safe to stray? Grey-green boles crowded him, the hulk of a dead giant or two lurking, back in the ranks. He suddenly wondered if he was dreaming. Yes, probably he was. The PoTolo narrative, the apparatus, the act of standing in that gate, feeling absurd in his wilderness kit, folded up like a telescope, became implausible as a dream. Only the twilit jungle remained concrete, but how did he get here?

He heard nothing. He simply became aware of a rush of small, purposeful movement, closing in. The creatures were highly camouflaged, about the size of ground squirrels: long, flexible snouts, shaggy, apparently limbless bodies. Their swift appearance seemed uncanny, the dream turned to nightmare, but of course they had smelt his blood. He fled, grabbing at appropriate defense, spun around and pepper-sprayed them. Which did the trick. Hell, they weren’t armor-plated, and they liked the taste of their own kind, a useful trait in aggressive vermin. Inevitably the drop zone was now out of sight, but before he could think about that, a new player arrived. Shaggy four-legged things: bigger than the first guys and smart, organized pack-hunters. He ran, but they had him outflanked. Forced to climb, he shot up the first three or four meters of his chosen refuge in seconds, and went on climbing, easy work, to a knot of boughs high above the ground. There he perched, assembling his pellet gun, thrumming with adrenaline and almost laughing out loud.

An exhilarating place, this planet called Desire!

No pack, and no effective firearms, a lack he might come to regret. He was equipped for the wilderness, but not for slaughter. How do you say “I come in peace” to a pack of Venusian hyenas? He saw formidable teeth, and hoped his armory was sufficient. But apparently Venusian hyenas couldn’t climb. The brutes circled, panting in frustration, then retreated, vanishing into the dim ranks of the trees.

Not worth it, muttered Forrest. Or I smell wrong, unappetizing.

He took stock of his situation: treed in a trackless forest full of hungry predators, some 2 or 3 billion years and around 38 million kilometers from home, and noticed that his secret burden of depression—the Black Dog mood that had haunted him for years—had vanished. Savoring PoTolo’s crowning moment, he wondered if he might be here for days. He’d need food; water; shelter; some way to defeat beasts that could tear him apart! The challenges he might face, possibly fatal, possibly insurmountable, delighted him.

He was debating whether to take the gun apart or carry it down assembled, when a severe, numbing pain alerted him to the tree’s behavior.

He bared his right leg and saw grey noduled strands tightly wrapped around his calf. The knot of boughs had produced suckers and sent them to feed, stealthily creeping inside his pant leg. Forrest grabbed his knife and slashed. The pain was unmistakably deep and compelling: there was venom involved and no time to lose. The suckers fell away. He slashed again at a row of puckered wounds, like scribbled smiley faces, opening a long gash, in the hope of bleeding the poison out. Too late. In the act of securing a tourniquet below the knee, he stopped being able to breathe, lost consciousness, lost his balance, and fell.

He woke on his back, lying on some kind of bed, a very warm coverlet confining him. He smelled foul meat and remembered being dragged through darkness, maybe in the teeth of those hyenas, in a red mist of pain … The pain was still intense, and there were other discomforts, possibly broken bones, but hyenas hadn’t brought him here—wherever here was. Flickering light showed a hollow, interior space, crudely furnished. There was someone with him, a figure squatting by a firebowl, poring over small objects on a slab. Silvery fingers rearranged the items, a sleek bent head pondered the pattern. He was sure he’d seen the same thing before, far away, in another world—

She’s telling my fortune, he thought, though how he knew the figure was female he had no idea. The items were swept away and vanished. The figure sat back, murmuring, looking down into upturned palms, seeming to engage in a dialogue with the Unseen.

He slept again. The pain burned low, like a smothered fire.

When he next woke, she was by his couch, in a very unhuman posture.

“Good,” she said. “You’re awake. Your head is clear?”

He nodded, staring. He had been rescued by a glistening, greenish woman with a muscular, sheeny tail, which she was using as a third lower limb, a hairless head, and bird- or snakelike features (green eyes that filled the face, a long mouth with an eerie curl, glint of needle teeth). She spoke and he understood her. He must be dreaming, after all.

“Your fall saved your life, at a cost. I have set your broken bones, the venom is overcome, but the nibbler bite itself is now urgent. Rotten flesh must be excised, regeneration triggers implanted. You should know: I can immobilize you, I can give you analgesics, but I can’t put you out.” She showed him her palm: he saw moving symbols. “I can read your cell signature on this, but not the details of its expression, and anesthesia is complex. I might kill you.”

“You are a medicine woman,” said John Forrest slowly.

“Yes.” Her eerie mouth curled further, until he thought her jaw would split from her face. “I am indeed. The procedure will be very painful.”

“Go ahead and operate, Doctor. Do I need to sign anything?”

“Not necessary.”

The operation was a success. When pain was once more a smothered fire, she told him all was well and he would soon mend. She asked him where he’d come from.

“From the sky,” said Forrest, “does it matter?”

“Not to me,” said Lizard Woman, her long mouth curling.

He noticed, at last, a spidery transparent headset, and a mic by her mouth, catching gleams of firelight. He raised an arm, the one that wasn’t still immobilized by the heated coverlet.

“What’s that?” he muttered, incredulous. “Some kind of babelfish?”

“Yes, sir, it’s a translation device. It may look old-fashioned and clumsy, but it converts my language into yours, and yours into mine, adequately enough. Mr. From-the-Sky, I have business that cannot wait. When you can walk, I’ll take you to a better-equipped refuge, where you may rest and recover in safety.”

Forrest decided that he wasn’t dreaming. He was on Ancient Venus, and his rescuer was a sophisticated Venusian, an unexpected bonus! She had some rationale to account for his odd anatomy and strange arrival: fine, he would let her be. He had no urgent need to explain himself. He couldn’t gauge how long he’d been in this cave, not even by the growth of his beard, which she had kept close-trimmed. But he could assume the retrieval had failed; probably he was too far from the drop zone. He wasn’t overly concerned. PoTolo would certainly keep trying. All Forrest had to do was get himself back to the zone, before the orbits of the two planets veered too wildly apart.

She walked him up and down. She showed him the “wellspring,” a water supply tapped from the root system of the trees, and explained how to operate a firebowl (the flames were natural gas, from the same source), how to use the gourdlike ration packs. Her tone was always frosty, if translated emotional nuance could be trusted, her conversation minimal. Forrest surmised, amused, that whoever he was supposed to be, in local terms, was a bad guy in her reckoning—temporarily protected by her Venusian Hippocratic Oath.

They left the cave via a twisting, crawl-space passage—waking nightmare memories for Forrest—and emerged from a hole in a huge dead root. Her “refuge” was the hollow under a giant tree stump. She led the way, Forrest stumped behind, favoring his lame leg. He’d tried to convince her to take him back where she’d found him, to no avail, and he was angry. But not such a fool as to strike out on his own, against her will. If Lizard Woman had dragged him below herself, she was extremely strong. Or had confederates he hadn’t met; or both, of course. She was alone, living on gourds of mush but implanted with impressive tech. What was the story? Who was Forrest supposed to be? So many unknowns, and he’d have relished them except that he was so annoyed.

But her pace started to tell. She had the pack, he carried nothing, which he found galling. If there were trails, she didn’t use them; if she had transport, she preferred to hike. What was she? Some kind of Venusian Backwoods Survivalist, humiliating a hated city slicker? He refused to be outdone. When she handed him one of those sappy-gruel gourds, he emptied it without breaking stride. But it got to be desperate work. She wore a floating grey robe; under it a shirt, and pants that accommodated the tail by having no back side. When the robe lifted, as she crossed some obstacle, he saw the big gleaming root of her tail, and it was sexy in a weird way.

Before long, her tail was the only thing that kept him moving.

Dizzy with exhaustion, he picked at his itching fingertips, trying to extricate a tiny, wriggling, brown worm or caterpillar from under one of his fingernails. He didn’t know he’d stopped until Lizard Woman was in front of him, taking hold of his wrist.

She pulled out her headset and donned it. “Your head swims,” she suggested, a cool, contemptuous light in her huge eyes. “Disoriented, can’t think straight? Your skin creeps?”

“All of that,” mumbled Forrest. “Well done, Doctor. You said you would help me.”

“I don’t believe I did say that, and yet I will.”

She was lying, things only got worse. Now they really went off the piste. Forrest was dragged through virgin thickets, thrown into ditches, forced over madsastrugi of upheaved root mass … until they reached a small clearing where a new kind of tree, reddish and gnarled, grew with no near neighbors. Stumbling and confused, he was ordered to strip, and hustled onto a natural platform among its roots. The lower part of the bole was scarred. She stuck something in his hand, forced him to grip, and shouted at him.

“Stab the tree! Stab it! Over your head. Cover your eyes. Okay?”

He was holding a knife. He reached up, and stabbed the tree. A huge gush of stinging hot liquid burst out, and pounded on him.

A hot shower! My God!

The itching that had been driving him mad, a vile, active sensation over his whole body, leapt to a crescendo. He looked down and saw a nest of little dark worms on his chest. More of them, over his belly, his arms. They were wriggling out of his pores, his anus, they were everywhere, there were hundreds of them. The hot, scouring liquid diminished. Frantically he stabbed the tree again, and again, oh blessed relief—

The first time he left the platform, she sent him back. The second time, she was satisfied, and slapped a new kind of soft-walled gourd into his hands.

“Hold that. Whatever they gave you, Mr. From-the-Sky, it doesn’t last. You’ll have to do as we do, in here. Depilate and use barrier methods, or the sippers will overwhelm you in hours. I’m going to fix you up, before you collapse.”

She made him sit on the ground, massaged a grainy goop into his hair, his beard, his arms and legs, his chest, his pubes: sent him to rinse off, then helped to apply a cream that left his skin shining like her own. There was also breathable gel, she said, as she sleeked his every crevice, for nostrils, mouth, and eyes: but it wasn’t necessary in the short term. The “sippers” wouldn’t block airways, or endanger sight, until their host was actually dying. The erection she provoked along the way didn’t bother her, she ignored it and so did he. But there was something between them, when he was hairless, purged, and dressed again, that had not been there before.

“Since we’re talking, sir. What about a name?”

“Forrest. My name is John Forrest, and you?”

“Sekool.”

“Sek. That means the woods, doesn’t it?”

“You know my humble language?”

He shook his head. “In the cave, I sometimes heard you talking to someone. Or communing with your gods? I listened. I figured out that sek meant woods, frequency of occurrence.” He gestured around them. “Since here we are.”

“I have no gods,” she said, and added, “Ool means song. The is a separating sound, my name is Woodsong. Sekool without the means something different.”

The distinction was obviously important: but he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Woodsong, okay. Er, John means gift of God.”

She laughed, at least the sound she made felt like laughter. His eyes burned, he’d forgotten to cover them, but the world was in focus. He was awake, alive, firing on all cylinders again, maybe for the first time since he’d touched down. He looked at the gouged tree bole, and the shower platform: a natural formation, smoothed by long use.

“There are people living around here?”

“There are the indigenes, primitive surface-dwellers: you won’t see them. A few others: you’ll see them even less. Let’s go. It’s not much farther.”

Soon they crossed a really large clearing, and he was able to gauge the height of the frondy canopy at last: impressive but not extraordinary, sixty or seventy meters. Only mosses grew on the open ground, but the springy, uncertain feeling stayed the same.

Sekool kept to the margin of the trees. Up ahead, a shadow moved, between the canopy and a ceiling of bright cloud; a grey curtain falling under it, defined like a rainstorm, seen from afar on a wide plain. Forrest thought they were heading into rain until they crossed the shadow’s trajectory, and he stared in amazement at the tangled, mighty underbelly—then flinched and ducked, as vagrant shining strands actually brushed his naked skull.

“Don’t worry,” she said. She’d kept the headset on since his shower-bath, a concession he appreciated. “They’re just eating air. It doesn’t know we’re here.”

They reentered the woods, and almost at once she halted, gesturing for him to step well back. A knotted growth, a tumor on a root, stood knee high in their path. Sekool crouched, her tail balancing her, and cut herself between the fingers of her right hand with the knife he’d borrowed. Was her blood red? He couldn’t tell in this everlasting rosy-green twilight—

“Wait. Don’t move from where you stand.”

Following her with his eyes, he saw the same ceremony performed again, farther into the trees on his right. What was she doing? Placating demons? Having met some of the demons, he didn’t move a muscle until she reappeared from the left. She’d circled round something big. They walked on and stood in the precinct of a truly vast dead giant: a tree stump tall as a house and broad as a barn. Forrest looked it over with respect.

“I hope this guy doesn’t feed on flesh.”

“Actually he does, but the heartwood is inert.”

The last section of the entrance tunnel was vertical. They descended a ladder into a room rounded and domed like the first cave, but far more spacious and better furnished. There were covered couches, low tables, domed chests, a firebowl at one focus of the ellipse, a wellspring bubbling at the other. Doorways (closed off) seemed to lead to other areas.

Forrest’s appetite had returned. He longed for steak, fries, and a good malt, but he made do with another sappy-gruel gourd (he should stop calling them “gourds,” since they were obviously manufactured), fell onto a couch, and plunged into oblivion.

In his dreams, the snouted things chased him, limbless bodies covered in worms. The hyenas circled under the venom tree, shaggy with their freight of bloodsuckers. The tiny worms that filled the sek’s air, and had invaded his pores, had smaller worms to bite them. He woke with a shuddering start. Nibblers, sippers: cute names for unappeasable horrors. Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together … Parasites are everywhere, far too many of the bastards on Earth, but if Sekool hadn’t found him, what an appalling fate! But she didn’t find me, he thought. She was watching me. “Your fall saved your life, but at a cost—”

He opened his eyes. She was beside him, in her tripod pose: wearing the headset. She smiled at him. He’d come to like that eerie, too-wide smile very much. But it had an edge to it, on which he feared to cut himself.

“I must return your gear.”

She handed over everything, including the pellet gun, which he’d assumed was lost or confiscated. “That is not a lethal weapon,” she remarked. “You carried none. What if you’d run into trouble, Johnforrest?”

What kind of trouble, he wondered. Friends of yours? “What if I did? Thou shalt not kill. I’m on a fact-finding mission, I’m not at war with anyone.”

“A fact-finding mission,” she repeated. “Indeed. I see.”

“What about you, Sekool? I’m deeply in your debt, of course, but what are you doing in this hellhole? How did you happen to turn up like that?”

“The surface is a source of raw materials, Johnforrest. We come here to make deals with the indigenes and squabble with each other over the spoils. I was researching tree venoms that can be weaponized, if you must know.”

“That’s no work for a doctor.”

“We live in the dark as well as the bright, Mr. From-the-Sky, and though I chose medicine, I was born to something else. I saw you run from the vermin, I saw you climb, then fall, it was pure chance.”

Now I know too much, thought Forrest. And whatever the hell’s going on, I get the feeling I’m in serious trouble. But you’d spare me if you could, for which I thank you—

He said nothing, just nodded gravely.

“I’ll be leaving soon,” she said. “Here you have everything you need, and no sippers or nibblers can reach you: the hollows under the great hearts are our safe houses. I’ll give you a homing beacon, since you have none, to guide you back to the spot where I found you. But you were very ill. Please wait: eat, rest, and exercise awhile before leaving. I’m not happy about the way you keep falling asleep in the daytime—”

“Oh, that? We call it jet lag. It’s nothing, it’s just taking me a while to adjust to a different time zone—”

Forrest liked to wear a wristwatch; he collected them. Before leaving for West Africa he’d had one specially made for this trip. An ingenious, expensive toy; instead of hours and seconds, it followed the intricate dance of the orbits of the two planets. Sekool had returned this device. He didn’t think she could have tampered with it. As he spoke he read the time, the only time that mattered to him, and his heart skipped a beat.

He wanted to ask her just how long was I “very ill”? How long is your world’s “day,” right now? He had no idea how to frame the question, and it didn’t matter. He knew enough of PoTolo’s complex requirements to be sure he’d missed his window. His next chance wouldn’t be coming around for … for quite a while.

“But Johnforrest, I have a proposal. It suddenly struck me. Why not come to the clouds? You’re on a fact-finding mission: I could introduce you to interesting people, and later we could surely set you down wherever you need to be.”

Forrest slipped the orrery watch into an inside pocket. Her big green eyes were limpid with lies, her smile had that bleak, warning edge, and he didn’t care.

“What a wonderful idea, I’d be delighted. When do we leave?”

If he was stranded, for a year and a half or forever, he might as well see the world. Stir things up, in this story he didn’t understand. Why not? If Lizard Woman feared for his life, maybe she just didn’t know John Forrest very well! But that pouch on the cord around her neck, where she kept her oracle bones, what was going on there—?

She was making arrangements for his visit: Forrest had “fallen asleep in the daytime” again. The room was dim, the lights that stood in wall niches were at their lowest setting. He heard Sekool’s voice, but she was nowhere in sight. She’d screened off an area at the end of the room, the way she used to screen his bed sometimes when he was sick. The headset lay on a table. Intrigued, he donned it and sneaked up to the screens, creeping around until he could peer between them. He saw himself, standing naked, quivering, full frontal.

The shock was momentary. He was looking as if into a full-length, freestanding mirror, but it was a mirror that didn’t reflect the room he was in. The naked figure was a hologram. A stranger, a Lizard Man (though he couldn’t see a tail) stood by the holo, dressed in black and white. Sekool, her back to Forrest, spoke rapidly in a language that crackled and fizzed like fireworks: but reached him as English (mostly)—

“No. He’s an original, not any kind of flishatatonaton. But he’s carrying an implant, attached to his stomach wall. I haven’t touched it, and I don’t know what it’s for—”

Good to know I’m still a walking interplanetary probe, thought Forrest. Lizard Man’s contribution, over the videolink, was incomprehensible.

“Deniable is good, but how long could it stand up? This is better. Far better than a … a kinsnipping, Esbwe! We want to avoid reprisals, don’t we?”

Her tail, he thought, should be lashing. He’d have liked to see that. He retreated, replaced the headset where he’d found it, and lay down again: his thoughts racing.

Feigning sleep, he must have dozed. He woke when he heard something crawling.

The globes were still dim, the screens had been dismantled. Sekool sat by the firebowl, tail around her feet. Nothing moved, but the sound of crawling was closer. Puzzled, Forrest turned on his side, as if in sleep, and saw something come through the wall of the room.

It crossed the floor. A male human figure, slender and juvenile, naked and very battered, hauling himself along on one hand and one knee, back, ribs, and shoulders marked with livid weals. Bruises blotted out his eyes. No sign of a tail, which made Forrest think he was asleep and dreaming of a human boy except that the whole thing was too complete, too coherent. The kid’s hair was dark, his greenish skin unnaturally pale—until he reached the firelight. Then he was more than pale: he was translucent, transparent.

A mangled corpse, but moving, the apparition crept into Sekool’s arms.

Another hologram? Not the way Sekool responded. Not the way she held the kid, rocked him and murmured to him, stroking his shadow-hair from his swollen, battered shadow-brow, then somehow Forrest made a sound.

She looked up: instantly, the ghost was gone.

“What was that?” he breathed.

Enormous eyes unblinking, she calmly left the fire and picked up the “translation device.”

“My son, Gemin. He comes to me when it’s quiet. Usually I’m alone; you’ve never woken before. He died under torture. Don’t die under torture, Johnforrest. It’s not a good way to go.”

She removed the headset and turned away; the subject was closed. Forrest got up and joined her by the firebowl, collecting the headset on the way. He held her gaze, deliberately settling the flexible web around his skull.

“Tell me, Sekool.”

She looked into the flames, drawing her tail more closely around her.

“There’s not much to tell. He was caught up in the secret war and taken hostage; we failed to negotiate his release. He was mistreated, our protests achieved nothing; we learned that he’d died. There’s nothing to be done. I only comfort him, and quiet him as best I can … Death is not the end, Johnforrest, as we all know, because our dead return. They speak to us and know us, in dream and in the waking world. But when they depart at last, we don’t know what happens next. We don’t know if the unquiet ones, trapped in the way they died, escape from suffering at last. It’s cruel.”

“I know you’re a shaman,” he said. “There must be something you can do.”

Her long fingers closed on the bag of bones.

“No. Let’s say no more about it. I can’t help my boy. He’ll fade, that’s all, and he’ll be gone, and I won’t know where.”

2. OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE FIRE

ON THEIR WAY OUT, SEKOOL HAD TO PLACATE THE DEMONS again. Forrest kept his distance and didn’t stir until she’d made her circuit. She seemed self-conscious, something he’d never seen in her before, and he liked it. He had no doubt that, if he’d asked, she’d tell him that of course she’d planned to disarm the venom-spitting fence, if she’d been leaving him behind (to await those kinsnippers!). He said nothing. He just followed her, as before, grinning to himself: no longer helpless baggage. In charge of his own destiny again, and it felt good.

But surely, subtly, everything had changed? Had the trees actually moved? Surely the spaces between the ranks were different, the uncertain ground had new contours—

“Happens all the time,” said Sekool, catching his bewildered glances. “The sek is a single organism: it shifts about as it pleases. That’s why there are no trails. The indigenes have their own ways to get around. We use our beacons, and come in on foot. It’s simpler.”

“What a world. It’s like a circle in Dante’s hell.”

“Indeed. All death in life is here, eating its own tail. Yet somehow I love it.”

—–—

There was a wind blowing outside the wood, they could hear it. Sekool gave Forrest a robe like her own: he wrapped himself, the folds settling firmly round his head and face, and they emerged from tepid stillness into a dust storm. Well protected but half-blind, he felt a hard surface under the skidding grit and glimpsed big squared and domed shapes. Fighting the wind to look behind him, he saw the sek: rising like a grey-green mirage, on the edge of a desert-devoured town. She headed for an intact building and used a touch pad to open massive double doors. In a covered courtyard, a welcome silence, she bared her face—

“I have a call to make. It won’t take long.”

The room they entered made Forrest think of a chapel: a podium for the minister, benches for the congregation. Images of lizard-people, animal, and vegetable flourishes, in colored metals or enamel, covered the walls. She approached the podium, Forrest took a seat. His legs were too long. Sekool was tall, but like a Japanese woman, her height was in her pliant body … Expecting a videolink, he saw, to his astonishment, powdery matter begin to whirl inside a clear cylinder: building something from the platter upward. The cylinder withdrew, and there stood a solid, masculine-seeming human figure, Venusian style: a Lizard Man. Not the guy Forrest had seen in the mirror-screen: someone new. He had scanty head hair, he wore some kind of dress uniform; he seemed authoritative but old; or maybe sick.

Sekool spoke, Lizard Man mainly listened. At one point, he looked over her shoulder, and Forrest, disconcerted, felt eyes on him: a presence in the instant simulacrum. Finally, Sekool bowed, the old guy did the same. The body crumbled and vanished.

She walked past Forrest, resuming her headset as she headed for the doors.

“Who was that?”

“My husband. Excuse him if he seemed rude, you’ll meet him properly up above. Do you have wives, Johnforrest?”

“I’ve had two. Then I gave up.”

“Wise man … I did what was expected of me. I gave a powerful old man my baby’s name, his futurity for our security. A fair trade on both sides: we didn’t expect it would be forever. I have no complaints, none at all. But oh, he’s a long time dying!”

She flashed him that eerie smile. “Now we need to hurry. The wind usually eases at nightfall, but I want to be far from here by then.”

In the covered yard, Sekool left him, and swiftly reappeared, leading an extraordinary animal: a low-slung, big-haunched, tan-hided, wrinkly camel, with bulbous cat’s-eyes, a sinuous neck and tail, a muzzle thick with stiff, drooping whiskers—

“Johnforrest, meet Mihanhouk. I don’t take him into the sek, but we need him now. You’ll have to ride behind me, I’m afraid. I wasn’t expecting to bring home a guest.”

Who had harnessed Mihanhouk? He listened. Not a footstep, not a voice.

“Are we alone? Where is everybody?”

“Only the indigenes live permanently on the surface, and around here they don’t leave the haunted woods. Let’s go, it’s a long ride to the Sea Mount Station.”

If anybody asks, he thought, the ground staff never saw me—

The cat-camel’s paces were challenging. He loped like a hare, pushing off from his big haunches, landing with an insouciant bounce on his forepaws. So far, so uncomfortable, then he put on speed. At every leap, Forrest (with muttered curses) nearly lost his seat; at every touchdown, his tailbone tried to send his cervical vertebrae through the top of his head. Sekool rode with her tail tucked up, stirrups high as a jockey’s. She glanced around, green eyes vivid between folds of grey and the whipping dust, registering his discomfort. She faced ahead again, and he felt a curious, thrilling, muscular movement.

She was wrapping her tail around him.

“Is that better?”

“Yes,” he breathed. “That’s … fine.”

Gradually, the howling died and the dust cleared. Mihanhouk seemed to feel he’d done enough. He ambled along a rudimentary trail, uphill, between eroded boulders that blocked the view, to a bluff like a wave crest. Sekool tapped his shoulder with the knotted end of her reins: the beast knelt, and they dismounted.

They climbed the last few meters to a viewpoint and suddenly faced a staggering gulf. Red-gold cliffs plunged, way deeper than the Grand Canyon, into the haze of a basin that stretched forever. To their left, far below the bluff, Forrest saw the trail continuing to another complex of buildings, and skeletal bridgework that reached out, over the abyss, to a rocky, conical pillar. Narrowing his eyes, he saw the sequence repeated: a string of rocky cones, rising from unseen depths, and the bridgework linking them, becoming tiny and vanishing.

Directly ahead, but far off, brilliant whiteness reflected the pale clouds.

“Is that the ocean out there?”

“Once upon a time,” said Sekool. “It’s mostly a big salt pan now. We live in the clouds and in the skies, Johnforrest, where everything is fine. Only fanatics think it matters that we can’t live on the surface anymore if we wanted to. Which is just as well. The situation down here is beyond repair, anyway.”

“So what’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile.”

“Indeed. I’d like to learn your language. From what I can tell, it has a fine turn of phrase, many interesting concepts. Thou shalt not kill. There’s another of them!”

Forrest nodded, his thoughts very far away. Out of the frying pan, into the fire … Our beautiful neighbor planet before she ran into trouble? Your calculations are slightly out, PoTolo!

“What caused the devastation? Do your scientists have an explanation?”

She thought about it, measuring her words. “Long ago, we lived in a dangerous world and didn’t know it. Everything was kind, plenty was all around. One day, we stepped on a hidden switch, we pulled the wrong lever, we unknowingly tipped a balance, and destruction was set in motion, click, clack, like a child’s toy: sly and comical and relentless. Or so I understand it. But we took that wrong step a very long time ago, Johnforrest. The damage was done before we moved to the clouds, let alone the skies. It’s nonsense to apportion blame.”

The stillness after the wind, the somber majesty of the scene held them in silence.

“I didn’t bring you up here to accuse you of anything, Mr. From-the-Sky. There’s something I wanted you to see, a trick of this landscape. Look to the east.”

He felt the chill before he saw the cause. Far away and very distinct, like a bold line on a child’s drawing, a dark ellipse appeared, stretching from horizon to horizon. It grew, like the shadow of the moon across the sun in a solar eclipse, contained, yet seeming liquid as ink. No flashes of radiance, no sunset colors heralded the change. The transition from light to shadow was perfectly abrupt, pure as a note of music.

It was the dark.

Forrest thought of a world without a visible sun. No moon, no stars. A horror ran through him; he wanted to run. At his shoulder, the Venusian sighed in delight, as perfect night, velvet night, rose to the zenith and hurried down to engulf them.

“There,” she murmured, when blackness lapped their vantage point.

“Thank you,” whispered Forrest.

They rode to the Sea Mount Station as if descending under miles of dark water. She’d fastened lights to Mihanhouk’s bridle, although he didn’t seem to need them: he was sure-footed and at ease. The Station was lit, and as deserted as the town by the sek. Their cable car, swinging from frictionless chains, black sides hung with rosy lights, reminded Forrest of an Egyptian ship of the dead, on a temple frieze. It rode silently down to their platform; they embarked.

Mihanhouk had a compartment to himself. Sekool made him comfortable, then joined Forrest in the stateroom, where a buffet offered store-cupboard foods: pickles, spreads, and tough breads, savory cakes of pressed beans (or insect larvae?), crystallized fruit. A fine change from sappy gruel. They moved on, having eaten, to an observation car, taking along a carafe of spirits. The couches were soft and wide: they settled side by side.

“Here’s another sight not to be missed, Johnforrest. We’re passing over the Trench.”

In fathomless blackness, way down under them, he saw a vivid, active red line.

“What’s that?”

“A rent in the world’s hide, close to the old coastline, where the fires of renewal pour out, and worn-out flesh is devoured. It’s shrinking … My city takes pictures. All the healthy wounds, as our scientists call them, are healing. It’s not a good sign.”

“I’ve heard about that.”

“When the fire stops flowing, when the wounds are gone … then even the clouds and the skies may fail us. But that’s a long way off. Neither you nor I need worry!”

Forrest filled two tiny cups, she emptied hers and held it out for more. Like-for-like translation, he thought, turned them into a medieval knight and his lady, speaking of eldritch secret dooms known only to the wise. She tossed her cup aside, and took his hand. Four-fingered, both outer digits opposable: she gripped like a chameleon.

“This is a great favor you’re doing for me.”

“A trip to the clouds?” Forrest smiled to himself. “It’s my great pleasure!”

“Still, I feel I owe you. Let me give you some return.”

“There’s no need.”

“Myself?”

“Well, now. That would be an unexpected bonus.”

“An interlude, I mean nothing more.”

“Of course not!”

Romantic overtures would have been in poor taste, but his lust was honest, and however she squared it, her offer seemed honest too. Seeing no reason to refuse, he reached around and took the splendid root of her tail in a forthright, determined grip.

The tongue that met his when they kissed was slender, strong, active, and probing. The gulf behind her smile could have swallowed him whole. They shucked out of their clothes and embraced, her tail lashed itself around him, and he probed in turn, deeper and longer than he’d have thought possible. Blissfully spent, he fell asleep, and woke still held in her grip, a silky, powerful frottage undulating up and down his thighs, his buttocks—

He wondered if he would survive this dark journey or die happy?

Unmeasured riches followed, an engrossing, fabulous interlude, only interrupted by the briefest of briefings for Forrest, about her city. They hardly ate or drank, they slept coupled and entwined. But once, when he woke, he was alone.

Sekool was on the opposite couch, limned in faint light, head bent over the oracle bones: the way he’d first seen her. He went over. She looked up, accepting, and drew back to let him see. Just four items—no bones. The “slab” he remembered was a paper-thin tablet, lit from within, marked in a grid of four by four. Plenty for a tribal shaman, still living at the dawn of time. Not much of an apparatus to model the fate of a complex, high-tech society.

But four by four is a powerful number.

The tokens are relics from your own life, he said. You’ve invested them with meaning, for telling the fortunes of your people: that I understand. Will you explain how it works?

A fragment of patterned textile, wrapped around three small flat sticks: what was.

A shiny feather or fish scale, set in silver wire: what might have been. Or, better: the conditional, the always possible.

A shriveled coil of brown, veiny material, probably a root fragment: what is.

A black stone, glossy as obsidian, was The Truth.

The headset was nowhere in this exchange. He asked and she answered in gesture, the timeless, universal language of this other trade of hers—

Does what you read come true?

If you know so much, you know that’s a fool’s question.

Then she smiled. The black stone in one fist, she laid her free hand on his breast, where his heart was beating. But when I know I’m right, however unbelievable, I’m right …

Forrest felt suddenly very confused.

Sekool returned her tokens to the pouch and slipped the cord over her head. She was soon deeply asleep, but he lay awake. Sekool Sekool, Woodsong the Sorceress. Had he really understood her? It didn’t seem possible.

Their arrival at Tessera Station was as dramatic as darkfall, in its way. Her city, a sky raft the size of Manhattan Island, had come to meet them. Moored by mighty hawsers, it stood at the sheer edge of the Tessera Plateau, beside the cable-car buildings. Forrest watched the underbelly as they came in: a mass of swollen, membranous dirigibles, layered and roped together in a gargantuan netted frame.

“Unlike the upper-atmosphere habitats,” Sekool remarked, “our cities were developed from life. The original bladder-raft colonies, which provide our germ material, still flourish: small as tables, big as mountaintops. We harvest and data mine them for improvements.”

“Fascinating,” said Forrest, making her laugh.

“About Gemin. You will be discreet?”

“Of course.”

She had told him that her city, Lacertan, led an alliance of liberal and independent cloud-cities known as The Band. The other major bloc was an empire, run on military lines, centered on a vast sky raft called Rapton. Empire and Band were currently, technically, at peace, but the covert maneuvering was vicious: this was the situation that had cost Gemin his life. The dirty story hadn’t been released, it was too inflammatory. The official line was that he’d been killed in a caving accident, on an expedition to one of the old ocean beds; and tragically it had been impossible to recover his body.

It was a prospecting expedition, said Sekool. In disputed territory, where there are rich pickings, and they ran into trouble. He shouldn’t have been there at all, of course.

They disembarked, smiling for the welcoming committee, in their desert robes and battered wilderness clothes. The Man From-the-Sky was instantly surrounded by officials and Venusian-style media folk. He didn’t speak to Sekool again for a while.

Forrest didn’t get to watch the return of the bright: Lacertan was riding strong winds and everyone was indoors, sleeping or not. But after that, the city—which had been quiet as an Arctic night—began to bustle. Washed, brushed, and dressed in Venusian formal style; provided with fine accommodation and service, he was swept from reception to reception. He ate high-class delicacies, no better or worse than the same absurd fancywork in New York or London. He talked (in like-for-like translation) with many interesting Venusians, and had no trouble passing for a denizen of the upper atmosphere. Contact between the realms was minimal, he was their first actual visitor: a Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Khan.

Perhaps the most personally interesting fact he picked up was that Lizard Men, like the naked ghost boy, had no tails. Which explained a couple of things.

He met Sekool again at his private audience with the Master of the City.

The simulacrum he’d seen had been a flattering portrait. In life, the Master was a wraith in a medicalized cocoon, though his eyes, appraising Forrest with great interest, were still sharp. Sekool was at the bedside, in a dark blue formal gown: the first time he’d been close to her since the cable car. Raised on pillows, the Master offered greetings translated by an aide wearing a headset. Forrest had arranged for the orrery watch to be boxed and wrapped, in suitable style. He offered it with misgiving, hoping that the gift at least looked impressive, but the old man fizzed and crackled with a connoisseur’s delight.

“The Master is pleased,” reported the aide. “He says the orbits of our planet and our near neighbor present a pretty problem. He has never seen the puzzle worked in craft with such elegance and charm. He suggests you must twin your soul with my lady’s brother, our Chief Scientist, who is also fascinated by the third world.”

Then the Master was tired, and they were both dismissed.

She donned a headset as soon as they were clear of the Master’s apartments. “I think you have no engagements just now, sir. Let me show you a view over the city.”

The view from the terrace was not dazzling, they were hemmed by blank walls and the defensive redoubt that protected the Residence. But there was a glimpse of bright cloud above, and more rosy greenery than he’d seen elsewhere.

“So that’s my marriage,” she said, pacing. “He was a good leader, now he’s old, and deathly sick. But he’s not senile and he doesn’t want to let go, so that’s that. He’s just forgotten how he’s paralyzing me: paralyzing the whole city—”

Her hair, grown out, ran in natural, feathery cornrows to her nape. She wore classy makeup, there were jewels at her throat. The gown was daringly décolleté in the back, at the swell of her tail’s root. But he missed her jungle pants.

“You think I’m speaking very freely? Don’t worry, everyone knows how I feel. Including the Master. Nobody’s going to blab indiscretions in your company, Johnforrest. These things.” She tapped her headset. “Are notoriously easy to hack.”

“What does the Master think about what happened to your son?”

“That the accident was in disputed territory, and anything’s better than war. That I can marry again when he dies and have other children. Or adopt, it’s been done before. That he’ll negotiate, when he’s stronger (which will never happen, he’s dying). I can’t bear to tell him how real my son’s suffering still is to me. So I just have to wait.”

The people of Lacertan, Forrest had learned, were a godless lot of sophisticated animists, like Sekool herself. They were liberal, they were easy, but the idea of their prince lying untended, “trapped in his death,” at the bottom of some hole, gave them the horrors. And they weren’t visited by that crawling corpse.

He knew he was talking to a desperate woman and forgave her many things.

“What about my twin soul? Your brother, the Chief Scientist?”

“Esbwe? Who knows? He’s an eccentric genius, he lives in a world of his own.”

The smile he loved fought with the pain. “Enjoy the rest of your visit. You may not have been following the reckoning, we’ve come a long way since you boarded. We’ll soon pass over the spot where you and I met, then I suppose you’ll leave us.”

That’s it, thought Forrest. He’d been wondering when he was due to disappear.

So be it.

The Chief Scientist worked in a surprisingly shabby old building, in a heritage area close to the Residence. He didn’t seem overburdened with staff, either. Possibly “Chief Scientist” was a courtesy title? The Minister for Science—who had escorted Forrest, only to be left twisting her tail in an anteroom—had been reticent on the subject.

Forrest was ushered into a big, shiny laboratory, full of expensive-looking equipment. A Lizard Man, in a black smock and white pants (Venusian-style professional clothing) stood peering into a clear tank, affecting to be unaware of the visitor. They were alone, and Esbwe definitely was the guy Forrest had glimpsed in the mirror-screen—

“Come and look at this, sir. Look into the visor and keep your hands to yourself.”

Forrest walked over, and obeyed. The tank seemed empty. Then tiny moving dots appeared, and took on form: became twisting strands that divided and recombined—

“What do you see?”

“Er, the living material of cell signatures?”

“Life, sir! On our world all life is doomed, that is beyond doubt. But I have calculated that the third world has a biosphere, and my great project is to infect it. As soon as I’ve perfected my delivery system, those animacula will be injected through the clouds, they will cross the airless deeps. And something of us may survive.”

“A noble dream,” said Forrest politely.

“You don’t believe me. How could one of us be an Interplanetarian? You gave the Master that orbit-tracking toy for a joke, I’m sure. You forget that the skies above our levels were often clear, before our habitats were launched. You overlook the fact that we cloud-dwellers hold a wealth of astronomical knowledge; observations many thousands of years old—”

“I find Lacertan science very impressive.”

The scientist stared unpleasantly, curling his lip in an ugly shadow of her smile.

“How generous! I’m not one of the idiots who’ve been fawning over you, Mr. From-the-Sky. To me, the sky habitats are the enemy, the Rapt are our natural allies. The sooner we can join the empire, the better I’ll be pleased, and I don’t care if you take that message home.”

“My headset is malfunctioning,” said Forrest, mugging puzzlement. “I can’t understand a word. I must try to come back another time. So sorry.”

—–—

Forrest didn’t need her to know he was a willing victim. Regrettably, he’d be safer if she didn’t. But now he felt they had to have a frank discussion. Maybe it was a fatal, irresistible temptation: be that as it may, luckily or unluckily, he knew the right venue for a meeting—in this city where she’d warned him everything he said and heard was monitored.

He placed a personal call to Esbwe and left a message confirming his second visit to the lab, naming a time after Lacertan office hours.

“Falling asleep in the daytime” was discouraged by incessant bursts of public music. A loud and melodious call to quiet relaxation was fading, as Forrest entered the shabby old building. Nobody about. He stationed himself around the corner from the lab and waited.

Sekool arrived. He was right behind her as she unlocked the doors.

“I thought that would smoke you out.”

“Excuse me? I was expecting to meet my brother.”

“I don’t think he’s going to turn up,” said Forrest, following her inside.

He’d chased his spoken message with an automated cancellation, which she wouldn’t have seen. Not that he cared if Esbwe came along. A frank exchange of views would be fine!

“Sekool, we need to talk, and I know this room is safe. I don’t think even your crazy brother would have risked the kind of open sedition I heard from him earlier, if Homeland Security were listening in. I knew this lab was firewalled, anyway,” he added, deliberately. “You made a videocall, from the great heart refuge. I saw him in here, when the two of you were planning how to use me in a hostage exchange—”

Her big green eyes got bigger, but she kept her head. No panic, no fluster. “So you know. All right … I was desperate, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went hunting for a suitable opposition candidate, I ran into you, and the plan changed—”

“Yeah. I was to be kinsnipped, after you left … But then you had a better idea. I’m clear with all that. I just don’t know why the hell Esbwe’s involved. That arrogant idiot is going to destroy you, Sekool. Did you know he’s seriously planning to sell this city to the Rapt? How do you think the Master, how d’you think your people, would like the sound of that?”

“Esbwe talks a lot of nonsense, nobody listens. I needed his expertise.”

But suddenly it was personal. They were two people who had been intensely intimate, but not very talkative. Here they were alone again, and the silence was falling apart—

“And he has a right,” said Sekool, her big eyes shamed and defiant. “An inalienable right, to help me recover our son’s body.”

“My God … Are you saying your brother is, is your boy’s father?”

She recoiled. “I know. I know how it sounds, but Johnforrest, I couldn’t marry him. He was erratic even then. He had no reputation, he’s no leader, he was totally unsuitable. I let myself get pregnant, but I married the Master. It made sense to me. My husband would die. I could never marry Esbwe. But he’d be beside me, our son would inherit—”

You learn something new every day, thought Forrest … So, talent gets courted and rewarded, dynastic power stays with the blood royal—

“Maybe not such good sense to Esbwe.”

“Maybe not … I asked his help, I owed him that. It’s illegal, of course: a simulacrum isn’t supposed to have a life span, but the deal is acceptable, it’s been accepted. What I did to you, to get what we needed, was theft, and I’m sorry—”

“A simulacrum,” repeated Forrest, stunned. “A flishatatonaton—”

“Yes? A short-lived fleshly automaton, for a dead boy. A fair trade, I thought, and we have a good chance of getting away with it. The Rapt refuse to admit they’re holding Gemin, and they’d love to know more about the sky habitats, even what little they can learn from an ephemeral puppet, but they won’t want to admit that side of the deal, either—”

So much for my heroics, thought Forrest. And she was bold, she was crazy-reckless, his Woodsong, but maybe Forrest was the one who needed forgiving—

“Sekool, it’s not going to work. I’m not, er, what you think I am.”

“I know.”

“You know—?”

“Of course. Esbwe’s convinced you’re a sky-dweller, but he makes puppets: I’m a doctor. In my world, boy babies’ tails are excised, at birth or soon after; the nonexistent gods only know why. Yours has never been excised, it’s vestigial and internal. That’s what I first noticed, but then, your entire skeleton is different. Not deformed, different; organs too. Your cell signature is legible, and obviously functional, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe I took a mad risk, but I did you no harm and I thought you’d be far away, and never know.” Her long smile broke out, uncertainly. “I’m sure you have resources I can’t imagine, hidden somewhere in the sek where I found you—”

“No, I don’t,” said Forrest. “No resources, ma’am. I’m a shipwrecked sailor.”

Her hand went to the pouch at her throat, she stared at him in amazement—

Then a man screamed. A hideous sound: high-pitched, jagged, and brutal. Forrest looked wildly around the empty lab. But Sekool leapt across the room, and slapped her palm on a touch pad. The wall beside her opened silently. Within the space revealed, a naked man sat strapped to a chair: flushed and dripping sweat, a headset clasping his skull, tools of torture attached to his body. The Chief Scientist stood by, thoughtfully adjusting his instruments.

The naked man was Forrest.

Sekool went up and stood over the chair. “The Rapt would have been kinder. Esbwe, you are disgusting. This was not in the bargain.”

“What’s he doing here?” snarled Esbwe, backing away and glaring at Forrest. “Now we’ll have to eliminate the bastard, and that wasn’t in the bargain.”

“I’ve been living under a madman’s heel,” said Sekool, in dawning wonder, taking out her knife. “I did you a cruel injustice once, Esbwe. I can’t undo it. But enough is enough.”

Esbwe howled in fury. “Don’t touch it! It’s mine!”

A lash of her tail sent him skidding into a wall. The knife plunged, violent and precise, into the hollow of the doll’s collarbone. She stared at the wet ruin.

“I don’t know why I never realized,” she murmured. “I don’t have to wait. I can seize power, I can make my own rules, give myself in place of Gemin if I must.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Forrest. “Sekool, when I thought you were going to hand me over in person, I was willing. I’m still willing. I’ll handle the hostage crisis. I’ve done the work before. Trust me, I’ll bring your son’s body home, and I’ll be fine—”

“Why would you do that, man from somewhere else?”

Forrest, smiling with his eyes, drew her close, and kissed her brow—

But something was happening. Were the palace guards rushing in? No, it was his hands, they were breaking up, vanishing. He felt a shock, strangely familiar, this had happened to him before … It was PoTolo’s method. The sky raft must be over the drop zone.

“Sekool! Wait for me! I can’t stop this, but I’ll come back!”

She laid her hand against his heart. “I know.”

3. THE BLACK STONE

WHEN THE ORBITS WERE ALIGNED ONCE MORE, JOHN FORREST returned to West Africa to repeat his stunt for a select group of scientists. He arrived before the guests and joined Dr. PoTolo, alone in the lab. Nothing much had changed, in the room with the big windows looking out to the sunset horizon. John Forrest, dressed as before in wilderness kit, also seemed unchanged; except that he was in a better temper.

“That thing,” he said, nodding at the oily black globe in its chamber. “Your time-travel gizmo. Does it have to be held like that, in the container?”

“No, it just has to be in the room.”

“What happens if I touch it? Sudden death? Radiation sickness?”

“You can touch it. I wouldn’t advise you to keep it in your pocket for a week,” said PoTolo, a little bolder, a little less intimidated, this time.

“You’re dispatching me to the exact place and time where you picked me up?”

“As requested, I’ll be using the complex of space-time values recorded during the successful retrieval. But you should know, Mr. Forrest, it isn’t that simple.”

On the previous occasion Forrest had disappeared at sunset and reappeared, mysteriously bedraggled, an hour before dawn. The interval (in local time, West Africa) did not, necessarily, indicate the length of his stay, or even prove that Forrest had arrived on the surface, and Forrest was no help. It was puzzling. But the proof that the probe had visited a habitable Ancient Venus was safely recorded in the data, and it was very, very convincing.

“You still remember nothing?”

Forrest puckered his lower lip and shook his head. “Nothing at all, alas.”

“We’ll do better this time. We have a memory-retrieval brain scanner on hand, we’ll pluck the images straight from your head before they can vanish.”

Forrest smiled politely, thinking of Sekool, the sorceress.

Her promise, which he was about to put to the test.

The guests assembled. There was some chatter, some flattery. He stood in the gate.

All eyes were on the human element in the apparatus. Nobody noticed that the globe had gone from its place. Hands in his pockets, he looked to the west, where Hawa herself was lost in cloud, but the stars that he would never see again were beginning to shine out.

The world disappeared.