Old Venus

Living Hell

JOE HALDEMAN

MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE STAYED ON MARS.

That’s a sentiment repeated so often here on Venus it’s right up there with “I should have read the fine print.” About a third of the people here first did a stint on Mars, and I guess we thought that Venus had to be better. Wrong as rain.

And Venus is rain.

There are dry periods up by the poles, but we don’t go there—no plants. And the equator is wind-driven steam that would flay the flesh from your skeleton. Only girls went there, heavily armored. And robots, and telepresence.

They could employ robots up here in the so-called temperate zone, too, but people are supposedly cheaper in the long run. Made with unskilled labor, as the saying goes, but more or less teachable.

Plus the advantage of unquantifiable factors like imagination and initiative, and the supposition that a team is more than the sum of its parts. Versatility and initiative. You can program a machine to solve a thousand different problems, and you hope it becomes a machine for finding the thousand-and-first.

This team found more than it bargained for.

Humans as individuals are fallible in their own ways, with errors less predictable than those of machines, but the other side of that is being able to see problems that didn’t appear to be problems and, once in a great while, solutions that don’t appear to be solutions.

We were almost killed by that virtue, back when humans were new here. People call it the Second Wave now, which is a little grandiose and hopeful, since if there was a First Wave, it consisted of only eight people, five of them eventually buried under the planet’s muddy soil.

“Buried” is kind of a euphemism, since anything edible is dug up immediately and integrated into the lively Venusian ecology. But cremation’s not a real option, not with everything wringing wet, surrounded by hardly enough oxygen to keep a match lit. Did I mention that it’s not a garden spot? Though it is full of plants.

I wrote into my will that if I die here, they should just put my body outside with a nice ribbon tied around some appendage. Use the ribbon from my Ph.D. diploma, finally giving it a useful purpose.

(On the way to and from Mars I accumulated thirty credit hours and wrote a dissertation on anomalies in heat-transfer models in extreme environments. Like the one I was going to enjoy on the planet of steam ’n’ stink.)

The girls who work down toward the equator have to stalk around in heavy plastic armor, but the air in their suits is cool and sweet. I applied for that assignment, but I think was automatically disqualified, not really for being male but for not weighing less than a hundred pounds. They’re all tiny and cute, and when you talk to them on the cube, they’re not wearing too much.

My friend Gloria, who works down there, lamented that it smells like a women’s locker room with no perfume. I imagined that I could handle that, compared to eau de rotting greenhouse, but was smart enough not to say anything.

I wouldn’t have any reason to go down there, anyhow. You might ask why someone with a physical-science doctorate finds himself with a job collecting biota on an alien planet, but that would prove that you didn’t know a lot about the intersection of science and bureaucracy. Half a lifetime ago, I got a bachelor’s in environmental engineering because that’s where the jobs were, but then went on to aero/astro. So of course when the wheels of the gods ground out this assignment for me, they saw the “EnvEng” and ignored the fact that I did go on to the physics doctorate, and have forgotten more biology than I ever learned.

The transfer orbit we took from Mars to Venus lasted six months, and I did take two biology courses en route. But I also wanted to finish my dissertation before I forgot all my thermophysics. So I absorbed just enough xenobiology to avoid touching plants that would kill me. You don’t need any course work to avoid the animals that would.

While I was up in orbit, we got a message from a movie guy asking about doing a Venus-based remake of the classic Jurassic Park. Much hilarity ensued. Someone remembered a joke about the difference between a producer in science and one in Hollywood: a producer in science needs decades of education, not to mention intelligence and dedication—so he or she can produce something. A producer in Hollywood just needs a phone.

Oh, and no one was ever eaten by a special-effects monster.

In fact, when we studied the macrofauna of Venus, it was with the understanding that for every animal that had a name, there were two or three that hadn’t yet made their presence known. Some very “macro,” and either good at hiding or so macro they wouldn’t even notice killing you.

My favorite is the flying carpet, both big and almost invisible underfoot. It looks like a large rug that’s contracted a skin disease—which means that it doesn’t look that different from most of the ground. You can stroll right over it, and it doesn’t move until you’re in the middle of its several square meters. Then it tries to roll itself up with you inside. Your warning is an enzyme that smells like rotten apple juice: if you smell that, you have about half a second to jump back the way you came. Because that enzyme ain’t apple juice.

The microfauna have had less success in incorporating us into the food chain; except for whatever the crotch-eaters like, our body chemistry isn’t compatible. The creatures who eat us get very sick, which seems only fair.

I supposed that they would eventually develop an aversion to us, but Hania, our only actual xenobiologist, says that’s not likely. Too many monsters and too few of us for them to eat and throw up. Thus not enough learning opportunities.

She would remind me that humans are the monsters here. I’ll persist in species chauvinism and call a monster a monster.

I remembered a point that my high-school biology teacher made: a prey animal that’s taken by a predator obviously can never communicate the knowledge of having been killed that way to the next generation. But a prey animal that does survive the encounter may communicate the thrill of the chase. Presumably the abstraction “that was close; better not do that again” is too complex for their ungulate brains.

But they do observe and learn. A complex example on Earth was a “tribe” of burrowing creatures, meercats, who would dive into their holes if humans approached carrying guns, but would ignore humans carrying shovels. (That was language behavior as well as perception and discrimination: the meercat who was the lookout had different sounds for armed and unarmed humans.)

There’s nothing as innocent as ungulates or meercats here. If there were cute fuzzy little burrowing animals, they would drink blood or give off a poison gas, or both.

The little disaster that led to the current trouble was the local space elevator’s falling down. Earth’s space elevator is as safe as the one at Macy’s, but Earth doesn’t have Venusian weather. One cable unraveled, then another, and it’s a good thing they’d put the equatorial station to the east of the damned thing, or it might have flattened all the human females on the planet. One of them did die in the storm of whipping cables and metal shreds. Two storage modules were destroyed, one with most of their food, and their shuttle was sliced in two.

They couldn’t survive for long on the planet, and they had no way off. So the wisdom of redundancy was made clear: each base had the wherewithal to keep both crews alive for longer than it would take for help to arrive from Earth. Most of those resources were duplicated again up at Midway, the unmanned synchronous satellite that was the nexus for the space elevator.

Midway probably wasn’t hurt when the elevator took its little trip. But it was suddenly a very expensive destination in terms of fuel.

My shuttle craft is “bimodal,” as an economy measure. It can fly around in the atmosphere of Venus or in the vacuum of outer space. In the miserly atmosphere, it concentrates oxygen from the planet’s thin “air” soup as it sputters along, but it’s nothing like a terrestrial turbojet. A lot of the energy from the engine goes right back into extracting oxygen. And if I fly too high, the oxygen concentrator seizes up.

The first-person pronoun there is unfortunately accurate. When the storm hit, there was nobody else pilot-certified at the “temperate” base. There wouldn’t really be room for a copilot, anyhow, once I picked up the women.

So my trip south was solo, slow, and tense. Most of the time I was flying low over ferocious electrical storms, so the ride was bumpy until I got high enough, and the radio was useless with static.

I did sporadically get through enough to know that the surviving women were safe for now, inside the living module of their shuttle, but of course it wasn’t flyable.

We didn’t discuss the other dangers. There were thunder lizards big and strong enough to tear through the light metal skin of the ship—it was great for keeping vacuum out and protecting against micrometeoroids, but even I, with merely human strength, could tear a hole into it with a crowbar and tin snips. The biggest lizards were half the size of the ship. If they thought there was something good to eat inside, they wouldn’t need to look around for a can opener.

The women had guns, as we did. But they wouldn’t have much value, even as noisemakers; the environment was full of dangerous-sounding noises. You can shoot at the native life all day, and it’s just target practice. Dumb as rocks. They don’t know somebody’s shooting at them. If you hit them, they don’t even know they’re dead.

They did shoot three or four of the beasts when they first landed. All that meat lying around rotting kept the other creatures occupied for a while, and most of them grew cautious enough to stay away from the ship, at least during the day. At night, there would be a lot of feeding and fighting, but during the day the larger meat-eaters mostly slept.

The women were doing fine in their way, and the men in theirs, for about a Venusian year, nine Earth months. And then the Sun decided to misbehave.

It’s not as if we hadn’t had solar flares before. They screw up everything for a couple of days, but you basically power down and play cards until the storm is over.

This was a superflare, though, the largest one recorded this century. It even shut down communications on Mars, let alone Earth and Venus.

Mercury Station had time to broadcast three words, or two and a half: “LOOK OUT—FLA …” It was not a warning for Florida.

Ten hours later, the coronal mass ejection from the flare hit us. Quantum electronics went south. Solid-state circuits became really solid, as in fused. Switches welded shut. Radios became paperweights.

The shuttle had been designed with a fallback manual mode that required no electronics. Of course, I’d never used it except in a training simulator.

The ship even had a paper-print manual, which gave off a whiff of mildew when I opened it. I’d studied it well enough to be certified, twenty years ago. And I could read the parts that were English. Most of the math was gibberish to a normal person.

Could I navigate well enough to find the women? Yes and no.

Venus does have a pole star, but you might have to wait a few years for a break in the clouds to align with it.

Or go above the clouds.

There was a manual fuel feed by a forward-facing port, along with an airspeed indicator and a visual fuel gauge. Of course, the gauge only told you how many liters of fuel you had left, not how far you could get on them.

The manual had appendices in the back that told you how much fuel the tub burned per second at full throttle, half throttle, and stall. The calculator bucky-printed on the page was useless without power, but luckily someone had had a sense of humor—there was an old-fashioned slide rule in a wall module like a fire alarm: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. Ha, ha. I used the butt of my pistol to gain access to lower mathematics.

There were several blank pages in the back of the manual, and in a MISC drawer, I found an old pencil with an eraser.

I couldn’t make the eraser work; I guess the battery was dead. But with the tables in the back of the manual, and the slide rule, I figured we had twenty-seven minutes of full acceleration, more than enough to get to Midway and refuel for Earth transfer.

Of course, the electronics on Midway would be useless. I could fly to it and dock by the seat of my pants. But could I get inside? Take care of that when we get there, I guess.

The most economical Hohmann transfer would get us to Earth orbit in as little as six months. I packed four and a half crates of freeze-dry in the shuttle, all I had at the one-man base. Buckled up and took off.

I took a suborbital trajectory up high enough to be in space, kind of, and found the south celestial pole in between Ursa Minor and Draco. Oriented the ship to be pointing nose south, and dove back down.

The equatorial station was fortunately at the intersection of an Amazon-sized river and a big brown sea, so I could just follow the sea’s coastline down to the river and look around. That would be simple if it were a nice clear day.

Venus never has one.

Buffeted by storm winds, I had my hands full keeping visual contact with the coastline while the ship pitched and yawed through driving rain. Too-frequent lightning glared every few seconds.

I didn’t expect to see the space elevator cable, less than a meter thick, until it’s close to the base. But you could easily see where it had fallen, a straight brown line of dead vegetation. When the map showed I was near the base, I dropped to treetop level and crawled along dead slow.

They damned near shot me down! A signal flare exploded just off my port wing, and by reflex I slapped the smart-descend. In the absence of electronics, that was not smart. It killed the engine, and I was a very heavy glider for about eight seconds.

I tried for the beach and almost made it. Branches slapped and scraped and did break my fall. I gouged up about thirty meters of sand and came to a stop just before finding out whether the thing would work as a submarine.

Or an anchor.

In fact, I wasn’t too badly situated, pointed seaward with the shuttle’s nose slightly elevated. I eased the throttle forward a fraction of a millimeter and it did fire up and move me a little nudge. So if I had to, I could get away fast.

In a bin marked SURVIVAL GEAR, I found a web belt with two canteens and a holstered pistol. Filled the canteens and put a full magazine in the pistol. There were ten more full magazines in a cardboard box; I dumped them into a camo knapsack along with some food bars.

There was also a heavy machine gun, too big to lift comfortably with one hand. Overkill, unless I was attacked by an infantry platoon.

The pistol was an old-fashioned powder type, flash and smoke and big boom. Maybe it would startle some monster enough to give it indigestion after it ate my arm.

Actually, as a usually observant vegetarian, I didn’t feel good about the prospect of blasting away at innocent animals. But I didn’t want to become part of the food chain myself, either.

I hoped I was within a few miles of where the girls had called from. The radio was all white noise and crackle, but I shouted a description of my situation into it anyhow.

They had probably heard the shuttle come screaming in and crash. Would they come toward the sound? I supposed I would, in their situation. Or maybe split into two groups, one staying put and the other going off to search for my smoldering remains. In any case, my most obvious course was to stay put myself, for at least as long as it would take for them to get here.

So of course I went outside. Or, to be fair, I did sit in the semidarkness of the emergency lighting for as long as I could stand it, maybe five minutes.

I drew the heavy pistol and opened the door just wide enough to see outside. Nothing slithered into the ship, so I opened it wide enough to exit and studied the jungle for several minutes. The ripe and rotten smell conquered the shuttle’s air-conditioning pretty thoroughly, but there was no sign of life bigger than an insect—though that might mean the size of your foot, on Venus.

It was a short jump to the ground. My boots sank two inches into the mud. I aimed around for targets of opportunity, a cheerful and optimistic phrase. None appeared, so I pulled the rain hat down tight and made a careful circle around the ship.

It didn’t appear to be greatly damaged. The leading edge of its wings had a couple of dents, which would limit reentry speed for atmospheric braking, but once I got off this blasted planet, I didn’t really plan on returning. When I got back to Earth, I’d just take the elevator down. Leave this tub in orbit for Solar System Enterprises to sell for salvage.

A snake I hadn’t seen reared up to about belt level. I fired reflexively and it flew away. A flying snake? Maybe it was just gliding, technically. Bad enough.

The snake had a face, sort of smiling, and bright yellow antennae, or horns. What a charming planet.

I hadn’t hit it, but the noise made my ears ring and the pistol’s recoil had smacked my palm like a baseball bat. I wasn’t going to be blasting away like some hero in a cowboy movie.

I almost didn’t hear the girls’ answering shot, surely less than a mile away. I fired again, and listened carefully while I reloaded two fat cartridges. I yelled “Hello?” a couple of times at the top of my lungs.

I went back to the shuttle’s stern. The primary blast nozzle was wider than I am tall, so nothing was likely to sneak up behind me. It was still radiating heat and creaking as it cooled, which might also discourage animals.

Unless they thought That thing is lying still and squeaking helplessly …

A voice I almost recognized shouted hello back to me. “Gloria?”

She came out of the jungle and I stepped toward her and stopped.

She looked like a very accurate cartoon. Sexy short-shorts and a halter top and bare feet. Bare feet? Walking in this jungle?

Her clothes looked painted on and her hair was perfect, solid.

“Gloria?”

She repeated “Hello.” But her grinning mouth was full of long yellow spikes. Her muscles bunched to spring, and I fired twice.

One bullet hit her knee, and the leap turned into a sprawl, that covered half the distance. She snarled at me, a hair-raising sound like a sheet being torn, and staggered back into the jungle—changing, as she went, into a creature that looked like a large cat crossed with an armadillo, armored shoulders and back. She left behind a spatter trail of bright blue blood.

The xenobiologists were going to love this. Of course there were Terran animals that used mimicry, but I think in a more timid way, trying not to be eaten. I don’t think any of them try to talk.

Getting back inside the shuttle sounded like a really good idea. Not an easy one to accomplish, though, without a ladder. The bottom of the door was almost at eye level, and I had last done gymnastics about thirty years ago. But with the help of healthy fear, I did manage on the second try to swing my right leg up high enough to hook a heel around the corner of the door and scramble up gracelessly, pulling a big muscle on the inside of my thigh.

I limped straight back to the survival-gear bin and hauled out the big machine gun. Four heavy magazines that held fifty rounds each. It was set up to fire bursts of four. So I could tap the trigger fifty times. Or just hose it around until the noise stopped. Reload and hose some more.

Up in the temperate-zone base, they had a noisemaker that made loud random bangs every minute or so, which kept the fauna away from the perimeter pretty well. Should I do that here? It might have the opposite effect, attracting curious flesh-eaters.

I sat there listening to the jungle and trying to access the young and foolish man I had been thirty years ago. Man-eating creatures with big yellow teeth? Hey, just give me a gun.

Now it’s sort of “give me a transfer.” We grow too soon old, my grandmother used to say, and too late smart.

There was a noise at the edge of the clearing. I raised the weapon and realized that I didn’t know what the drop was set for. Aim high or low? Well, I wasn’t that good a shot anyhow.

The woman who came out was not half-naked and was not Gloria. She took one look at me and screamed.

I lowered the rifle. “Sorry!” Waved at her. “Get in the ship! There’s a wounded animal out there.”

Three of them followed her, sprinting across the sand; the others hobbling along as one five-legged limping beast. Gloria was trying to hop on one good leg, supported by two other women. Her leg gave out while I was watching.

I slid down, keeping the rifle pointed at the jungle. “What happened?” Gloria didn’t respond.

“Some goddamned thing bit her,” another of the women said. Gloria was barely conscious, pale as snow except for the leg, angry red up past the knee, puffy with streaks of black. “Is it gangrene?” the woman whispered. She had a Texas accent and her name patch said LARAMIE.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.” Gangrene was just a word to me, something that happened to people in old novels. This was probably something worse, something Venusian.

In novels, the choice was always between amputation and death.

“I have a diagnostic suite,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t designed to survive a crash landing.”

“You weren’t, either,” a tiny woman said, “but here you are. Let’s get her up there.”

It was a clumsy business, me hauling from above while the two taller women pushed from below. She cried out, then moaned and passed out, her eyes rolling up.

Laramie was tall enough to lever herself aboard the way I had, and together we laid Gloria down gently on the cot that unfolded under the diagnostic machine. She was some sort of medical specialist, a caduceus patch on her blouse. She rapped on the two output screens and they stayed dark, ignoring her authority.

Its ON switch didn’t do anything, even though it was properly set in the auxiliary-power position. Well, the lights on the same circuit were dim. Maybe the machine required full power or nothing would happen.

I got a neomorphine pad out of the kit, but the nurse Laramie stopped me from tearing it open. “Better not,” the short one said. “She’s had more than a double dose already. Doesn’t seem to do anything.”

They tried to undress her, but the swelling made it impossible. I found some shears in the toolbox that could just barely cut through her suit fabric, which was reinforced by some strong plastic thread.

Taking turns, the three of us managed to cut a ragged line around the leg of her suit just below the crotch, and then snip down from there to the swelling. She woke enough to moan, shaking her head from side to side. I tried to say reassuring things, but she wasn’t hearing them.

Her jaws clenched against screaming, she squeezed my hand hard enough to make the knuckles pop.

We snipped down far enough to relieve the local swelling, but that didn’t seem to reduce the pain.

“She’s fighting something our bodies have no defense against,” the medic said. “I don’t know …”

Gloria cried out, back arched, then her body suddenly relaxed. Her eyes closed and she sagged into stillness.

“Shit,” the medic said quietly. She pressed two fingers under Gloria’s chin. “She does have a pulse.” She rapped the machine again, harder.

I got a multimeter out of the tool kit and checked a couple of connections. Exactly half of the power-cell elements were dead. I unscrewed the top of the battery box and ducked away from the sharp smell of formic acid.

“Here’s the problem.” I pointed to where the bottom three elements shared a wide crack, which oozed purple solute.

“You can’t fix them?” the small woman said.

“Not even in a shop, no,” I said. “On Earth, you’d just switch out the ruined elements. Even on Mars.” I picked up a dirty shirt and wiped the acid away from the crack with it and stared and thought. “Your own electrical system is out, completely out?”

“I don’t know about ‘complete.’ The ship’s dark,” the medic said.

“What about this part?” I tapped with the wrench. “The fuel cells?”

“I guess it’s pretty much junk,” she said. “It’s all crushed and … and …”

“Julie’s body’s in there,” Laramie said. “Stuck there. We couldn’t get her out.”

“We didn’t really try,” the short one said. “No chance she survived.”

Sounded grim enough. “No chance at all?”

“Head crushed,” Laramie said, her voice husky. “And a lot more.”

“Could you see the control console? I mean … is it possible the power cells are intact?”

They looked at each other and shook their heads. “Couldn’t see in,” the medic said. “Didn’t go too far in.”

“She was … all over the place,” the little one said. “We had the communicator out, and the canteens, and didn’t want to go back in if we could help it. We called you guys and they said you’d get here in an hour or so.”

In their dreams. But I checked my watch and was surprised to see that only a couple of hours had passed since I took off.

I looked down in the direction they’d come from. “How far is the ship?”

“Maybe ten minutes down the trail,” Laramie said.

“It’s an actual trail?”

She nodded. “Easy going.”

“You didn’t cut it?”

“Huh-uh … it was just there.”

That wasn’t good. In the absence of people, it had to be a game trail. The planet had lots of herbivores, harmless enough in themselves. But the animals they were game for could be a problem. Probably one’s last problem.

I rummaged through the toolbox and selected the biggest screwdriver and some heavy metal shears, the kind that uses a heavy spring to magnify its force. A flashlight. Still one empty pocket in my fatigues. I wished for a grenade.

“What, you’re going back there?” the medic said.

“Guess I have to. You see an alternative?”

“I’ll come with you,” Laramie said. “You don’t have eyes in the back of your head.”

“I can’t—”

“Just give me the damned pistol and let’s get going.”

No place for chivalry here. I handed it to her and picked up the machine gun with an extra magazine. “You all stay inside here.” As if anyone would go out for a stroll without a handy machine gun. I hopped to the ground and jacked a round into the chamber. Scanned the jungle line and gave Laramie a hand down.

“Back the way we came?” she said.

“Might as well.” If we tried to beat a new way through the jungle, the noise might draw attention. Though the rain was pounding down pretty hard.

We were about a minute down the trail when we ran into our first fauna. It might have been a big green rock, to a casual observer. But six stubby, scaled legs appeared underneath it, and a large head craned out, bigger than a human head and sporting a bright yellow beak and bulging sky-blue eyes. A black wattle on the sides of the beak, and a crown of unruly black hair. Gills flaring, bright pink.

It hissed and tipped back, reaching out with two front legs—arms—that sported glittering black talons.

I fired once and the bullet spanged off its shell, apparently to no effect. I aimed for the head, but by then it was gone. Moving way too fast, for a turtle-ish thing the size of a small car.

It left behind a smell like burned chocolate.

“Ever see one of those?”

“Not so close,” she said in a small voice. “Sometimes we’d see them watching from a distance, smell them. But we never caught one.”

“Probably a good thing. It’s aquatic?”

“We first saw them in the ocean.”

“Wish they’d stay there.” The sound of the shot, though, might have chased them away, back to the water. Or they were hiding, lying in wait.

We hustled down the path, swatting at bugs occasionally, but the biggest animals we saw were about cat-sized. Or armadillo-sized; they all had shells. They didn’t attack, but they didn’t run away, either.

I smelled the wreck before I saw it. A wartime smell no one ever forgets. I swallowed back bile and Laramie bent over and puked.

She coughed a few times. “God. We haven’t been gone that long.”

The scientist in me followed the same thread. How long does it take for a hundred-some pounds of meat to decompose that much? I knew from a unit in forensic medicine that it should take all day, or more, even in this heat. Even with a body that had been squashed? That would speed things up.

“Probably some Venusian microorganism,” she said hoarsely. That made me feel queasy. Whatever it was, I was breathing it. We went around a long curve and found the wreck.

This ship was never going anywhere again. A big tree had crushed it between its reactor and fuel tanks, faint smell of hydrazine on top of the stench.

The ramp up was twisted and it creaked under our weight. We went up slowly, deliberately, not eager to get there.

Julie had been beautiful. Now her face was gone. Every place skin had been exposed was a mass of red and orange cilia, wriggling. Her body smelled of molasses and decay. Laramie edged around it without comment.

The smell was different from my memory of corpses on Earth, when I’d been an unarmed medic in a short war. Burial detail. This was less pungent, perhaps sweeter, perhaps more like mold. Most of mine had been dead for some while, though.

My feet didn’t want to move. I couldn’t take my eyes off the nightmare. I hadn’t known her that well, but we had flirted in a joking way back at Farside a couple of years ago. The mouth I’d kissed good-bye was grey bone now and too-white teeth.

“We don’t have all day,” Laramie said gently.

There were no lights inside the wreck, but I had a small penlight. Fortunately, the pilot controls were old-style, almost identical to the ones I’d trained on.

I unscrewed the access panel and held my breath when I touched the fuel-cell terminals with the two multimeter probes. Twenty-three volts, plenty.

“Think we’re okay.” I had to use the shears to free the fuel cell, doing maybe ten thousand credits’ damage. Send the bill to fucking Venus.

It weighed less than thirty pounds, clumsy rather than heavy. But I only had one free arm now. “Take this,” I said, and traded her the rifle for the pistol. “You better lead.”

By the time we inched past, the corpse was totally covered with the colorful worms, writhing more slowly. Nothing human visible. You couldn’t even see bones anymore.

The smell was gone.

“Same way?” she asked as we stepped carefully down the ramp.

“Yeah. What happened to the smell?”

“Nothing left to generate decomposition gases, I suppose.” She shook her head. “In just a few minutes, Jesus. Fast work.”

We had company before we reached the bottom of the ramp. A crawling horror about the size of a man was waiting patiently. A chimera with head and arms but no legs, just a long, tapering body, shiny with bright yellow scales. Three eyes that looked old and wise, over a red mouth dripping saliva. A grin full of sharp teeth. We both fired and missed, and it squirmed away. My second shot hit its tail. It wailed like an oboe with a bad reed, and it rose up to stare back at us malevolently before it ducked under my third shot.

“Get back in the ship?” Laramie said in a quavering voice.

“I don’t think so. If we can’t raise the ramp or close the door, we’re gonna just be dinner, as soon as it gets dark. Have to get back to my ship.”

We were at the edge of the ramp when something moved in the brush in front of us. “Christ!”

It also looked about man-sized, but then raised itself up on a combination of arms and tentacles. Dark blue and shiny and higher than my head.

I fired and missed; fired again and hit it square. It opened its mouth—bright red tongue and shark teeth—and said “Oh! Oh!” in a loud bass growl.

Laramie was pulling the trigger over and over, to no effect. “Arming lever!” I said. “Cock it!”

“No!” the beast said. “No! Don’t cock!” Two spindly arms, like a tyrannosaurus, raised up. My last bullet took an arm off at the elbow.

It howled in pain. “I said No! Don’t! Don’t shoot. Me.”

A pink tentacle wormed out of the arm stump. It turned dark blue, curling, then flexed and became a new arm. “See?”

Laramie lowered her weapon. “Are you … talking to us?”

“Yes! Trying! Talk! To talk.”

I left my finger on the trigger but didn’t pull it. I looked at the beast over the pistol sights. “You can talk?”

“Yes! Not good!” The new arm had completely regrown. The creature studied it from a couple of angles. “Don’t do that again! That hurts!” It picked up the severed limb and sniffed it, and then swallowed it in two horrible bites.

“Taste,” it said. “A man should taste …” It shook its head violently. “A man should share, no.” It looked at its new hand. “Pain. Peril. A man should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being.” It opened its jaws wide, with a loud cracking sound, then sat back and cleared its throat.

“ ‘A man should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1884 Old Style. May 30.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“D-juh, d-joo, Julie. I know what Julie had. Has. In her brain.” It nodded slowly. “Had in her brain at the time that she joined me.”

“Because you ate her?” I said. “Ate her brain? Jesus!”

“No, no!” It shook its head violently, spraying tendrils of saliva. “Because … ‘because’ is hard. Itself.”

“Riddles,” I said, and tightened my grip on the gun.

“Wait,” Laramie said. “You mean ‘because,’ like, causality? That’s hard?”

“Yes.” The beast’s gaze swiveled to her. “Causality is not simple. I am her. When Julie died here, she became part of here. Part of Venus. And so part of me. She will always be.”

It looked back at me, huge blue eyes. “Everything. Every worm, every microorganism that ever died on Venus is part of Venus, forever. It’s different from Earth and Mars, I think.” I heard a step behind me, and turned.

It was Julie, my Julie. Naked, whole, unharmed. Next to her, Gloria. Also naked, leg completely healed.

“Dying is not the same here, darling,” Julie said, and shrugged. “Not so permanent.”

I fainted dead away.

—–—

The science of it is still not clear, to put it mildly. If it even is science.

The Venusian I tried to kill had “sort of” died dozens of times, in the centuries of life it remembered. For a Venusian to actually die, for keeps, it takes something catastrophic, like a fire. Otherwise, it will go through a rejuvenating process like the grisly transformation we had seen starting with Julie’s body. “Food for worms” doesn’t mean the same thing as on Earth.

There’s a lot that doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. Astronomy, biology, cosmology, just to start down the alphabet. If a planet can be sentient, what do you redefine? Planets or sentience? It has to be both, and everything.

It’s an existential headache, and not just existential.

The main thing Julie suffered was a profound career change, from explorer-scientist to laboratory animal. Or perhaps a new kind of explorer.

As far as researchers have found, all she lost was a portion of long-term memory. She could still do calculus and higher math, but had to relearn the multiplication tables and long division for them to work.

We spent many hours picking up where we had left off, on Farside a few years ago. At first I was helping her to reclaim her memory. Then we started making new memories of our own.

So now I’m living with a woman who is, I suppose, technically not human. That hasn’t stopped us from making a couple of copies.

So far they seem to work all right.