Old Venus

Bones of Air, Bones of Stone

STEPHEN LEIGH

TAKE A SMALL ROCK, TOSS IT INTO A ROTATING CYLINDER, AND pour in abrasives. Tumble the mess for several days, while the grit gnaws at the hard edges and scrubs the rounding surfaces. What eventually emerges from the harsh chrysalis of the tumbler is rock subdued and transformed, shimmering and polished like molten glass, all the hidden colors and veins revealed …

Somewhere in my early teens, my parents gave me a rock-polishing kit. I went pretty quickly through the provided assortment of pebbles, pleased with what came from my growling, slow cylinder but bored with the tedious, long hours needed for the result. Like most kids that age, I preferred instant gratification. I would almost certainly have set the polishing kit aside like every other hobby of the month I’d owned, except that my grandmother, Evako, came up to my room one evening not long after.

“Here, Tomio,” she said, handing me a drab, ordinary piece of dark rock. “Run this through your noisy machine for me.”

“Sure,” I said—we were all used to the brusque demands of the Norkohn Shuttles matriarch, just as she was used to obedience. I tossed the rock up and down in my hand. It was nothing I’d have chosen: a chunk of undistinguished granite. “Why don’t you get some opal from the gardener, Obaasan,” I suggested, not wanting her to be disappointed with what I was certain would be mediocre results. “It’d look a lot better.”

She sniffed, taking the rock back from me and holding it in her fingers. I remember that her fingers were thin and wrinkled already, with knuckles swollen and large with arthritis that would only worsen as the years went on. “Obviously you don’t know what this is,” she told me.

“It’s granite,” I told her. “And it’s about as common as dirt.”

She shook her head at me. “This is Akiko. My obaasan.”

I could feel my brow wrinkling. “I don’t understand, Obaasan.”

“So I see.” Obaasan Evako sighed and sat on my bed, twirling the rock in the afternoon sun coming through the window. “Akiko had a wonderful garden in our villa in Chincha Alta. I grew up there, and that’s where I always came back to visit her. On my last visit, just before she died, I took this stone from the garden—not an important stone, not any different from a thousand others there. Yet … every time I look at it, I can see Akiko again, and that garden. As long as the rock lasts, so will that image in my mind.” She had been speaking more to the sunlight and the rock than to me; now she turned and fixed her gaze on me, as sharp as the flaked edges of the rock. “How can this rock be less than beautiful, with the truth and memories it holds?”

She didn’t say anything else, just placed the pebble on the cover of the bed and left the room, knowing that I’d do what she asked. And, of course, I did. It took several days to give the rock the right sheen, to take all the edges from it. When I finally took it from the tumbler, a pointillistic swirl of colors rolled in the palm of my hand and I found myself turning it over and over, marveling at the complex play of hue and shade.

Obaasan Evako, when I gave it to her, nearly smiled. “Now it looks more like her than ever,” she said. “Now I can see the true beauty of her that was hidden in the stone.”

Ever since then, for many years, I would take common pebbles from places that were important to me at the time and try to uncover whatever gift they held. Many times the results were disappointing, an utter waste of time. But a few of them I’ve kept with me, wherever I’ve gone:

—a pale pink crystal shot with fractures that comes from the garden of the Norkohn estate on Cape Hinomisaki near Izumo—a piece of home that pulls Nippon and especially Shimane Prefecture up from its resting place in my mind …

—a thick needle of dark gray granite from the hills of New Hampshire, where I went to university, the subtle, rich satin of its surface never failing to conjure autumn on the east coast of North America …

—a nearly round ball packed with fine, crazed white lines from Tycho Crater on the moon: my first trip offworld, the quick panic of stepping outside unprotected from vacuum except by my space suit, the euphoria of bounding in one-quarter gravity across dusty plains …

—a red-orange marble with streaks of rich brown: I plucked that from Olympus Mons on Mars during my ascent with Avariel. I thought then that I’d met the one true love of my life with her …

—an ebony, glassy spheroid speckled with blue-black highlights: the beach at Blackstone Bay. That stone was also Avariel.

That stone was Venus.

I’d not expected to be back on Venus ever again. I thought that all I would ever retain of Venus and Avariel was that fragment of polished lava.

The single, precipitous main street of Port Blackstone was raucous and loud, and more crowded than I remembered. There were even a few shreeliala on the streets, too, something that when I was last here—a decade and a half ago—wasn’t common. Back then, if you saw shreeliala—the sentient Venusian race who lived under the waves of the Always Sea, the endless and shallow ocean that covers their world—it was either down at Undersea Port or if you were out on the Always Sea. I could smell their cinnamon-laden exhalations as I passed them, sucking in seawater from the bubblers strapped between the double line of fins down their backs.

The buildings I passed on the way, clinging like limpets to the steep side of the volcanic island that was the single landmass on Venus, seemed weary and exhausted. The fresh paint that had been smeared on them seemed like the too-thick makeup on an ancient whore, enhancing rather than hiding age.

The smell was the same, though. The winds that smeared the low ranks of the clouds over Port Blackstone smelled of the Always Sea: an odor of sulfurous brine, a stench of rotting vegetation; the cinnamon of the shreeliala. The air was as thick as I remembered its being, heavily oxygenated and laden with moisture. There was no sun; there was never a sun during Venus’s day, only the smeared, unfocused light that the clouds allowed through.

And the rain …

If the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, the humans who live on Venus have nearly as many words for the types of rain that the eternal clouds spew down on them. It was raining now, as it usually did—what the locals called a sheeter: a needlelike, wind-driven spray that was part rain and part foam ripped from the ocean waves. The sheeter hissed and fumed against my rainshield as it pummeled the buildings on either side of me. Lightning shimmered blue-white through the clouds overhead, sending brief, racing shadows across the street; the thunder followed a half second later, crackling and loud enough to rattle the windows in the nearest buildings.

I walked down Blackstone’s lone, rain-slick street from the flat plateau, where the supply shuttles landed on the shoulder of the volcano, toward the port proper, my luggage rolling along behind me on its autocart. At the far end of the street, amongst the piers and jetties and the eternal wave-spray, the street finally plunged under the long, racing swells: Undersea Port, where the human world met that of the shreeliala.

Maybe it was the relentless and grim dimness of the day, maybe it was my expectations, maybe it was the oppressive heat—have I mentioned the heat yet?—but Venus and Blackstone seemed less than enthusiastic in welcoming me back from Earth after over a decade. A group of youths, dressed in thin laborer’s clothing, ran by me in the rain, shouting half-heard words in their thick Venusian accents that might have been curses; shopkeepers leaned in the doorways of their businesses, staring at me like the intruder I was.

I knew why they stared …

It’s not often that you see a person with field prostheses, especially not in an age where limbs can usually (“usually”… such a comforting word unless it doesn’t apply to you) be regrown. The emptiness between my hips and shoes were twin-shaped fields, the controls implanted along my spine. The shoes—the far end of the field—moved as if attached to bone, sinew, and flesh, which showed my years of practice. In the correct light, you can see the heat-waver of the fields; an imaginative person can sense the flexings and almost glimpse the transparent legs.

Almost.

I would wear long trousers and have it appear that my body is whole, albeit somewhat stiff, but why play that charade? Obaasan Evako always scolded us for telling unvoiced lies, for pretending to be something we weren’t. Besides, no one wears much clothing on Venus: it’s too damned hot and too damned wet for that. So instead, I wore shorts which just covered the stumps of my thighs, which means that I looked like the torso of a dismembered body floating ghostlike a meter above the ground. I wondered how many of those here would think back fifteen years and remember my face from the newscasts of the time. Probably none of them looked at my face at all.

Fifteen years ago, I’d left my legs behind on Venus. I’d left behind a lot more, as well. I ran fingertips over the cool, smooth surface of the stones in my pocket, and when I found a familiar shape, I pulled it out. The stone, polished and about as big as the tip of my little finger, was satin black and glassy, flecked with a blue that was almost black itself. I turned it in my fingers, looking at all the familiar swirls of its polished surface, then shoved it back in my pocket.

My last stop had been the Blackstone Library and the data terminals there. Avariel was here, somewhere. When the Green Council announced that Blackstone would be reopened to offworld traffic, I’d known she would come here. I’d been afraid she would. Now I’d seen the permits from the Green Council, and I knew what she was planning to do.

And that scared me …

The night was strained with some invisible tension, and those outside glanced up at the eternal clouds of the planet as if they might see some doom about to descend on them. I’d probably find my own, I was certain, before too much longer. I left the streets gladly.

As I entered the hostel’s lobby, the owner opened one eye and blinked at me from behind the desk. From the shifting blur of color in his left eye and a haze of tinny sound around him, I knew he was watching something on his implant. He’d also “gone native”—those who had decided to make Venus their permanent home often had surgical modification, and I could see the healing tracks of gill covers along the proprietor’s neck.

He snarled something in my direction.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, spread those legs, you bitch …”

Not having legs, I assumed that wasn’t directed to me and waited as he grumbled to his feet. His grimy fingers (new webbing set between them) scrabbled on the grimier plastic of the registration desk. “You need a room?” he mumbled, only slightly louder this time. He reached below the counter, then slapped down a registration pad. His hand stayed on it, fingers splayed so that the speckled webbing was prominent. “Usually, we’re closed by now,” he stated. “I stayed up past my usual time ’cause I knew there was a passenger on the shuttle.”

His right eye stared, vague shapes moved in his left. A chorus of insects moaned around him. “Nice of you to do that,” I ventured.

“I’m missing the best part of my favorite show now.” A forefinger tapped the pad.

I fumbled in my pocket—the one without stones—and fished out the coins I found there. I placed them alongside the pad. His hand spider-crawled over to the money, and I put my hand on the pad. It beeped and chirped. “Room’s just down the hall,” the hostel owner said.

I nodded to the owner; his duty accomplished and tip secured, he was already lost in his entertainment; he didn’t even notice my lack of legs. His eyes were closed, his lips moved with the verse of some unheard song.

I went down the hall to my room.

I stayed long enough to unpack a few things, then hobbled out of the hostel toward the lone Blackstone tavern, fumbling with anxious fingers at the five or six polished stones in my pocket. Fifteen years ago, the establishment had been called “By The Sea,” and Avariel and I had eaten and gotten drunk there a few times before we left the port. The sign outside the establishment proclaimed that it was now “Venus Genetrix”—Mother Venus. I doubted that anyone here either knew or cared. I was just glad to leave the wet, steep streets and the suspicious stares for the bar.

“Fuck, look at that,” someone said as I entered, in an inebriated stage whisper. Half the patrons of the tavern glanced around at me with that, and in the blur of faces, I saw her. In an alcove to the back, she sat in the dim light. Seeing Avariel reminded me of too many things. I wanted to hide. I wanted to run.

Running is one thing I’m no longer capable of; walking’s the best I can manage.

Instead, I smiled, rattled the stones in my pocket, and walked toward their alcove.

Next to her was a shreeliala, the tubes of a bubbler wrapped around its purple-and-green neck over the gill slits, its long, webbed fingers lifted as if it were in midspeech with Avariel though its mouth was closed, and it, too, was looking my way. Its huge eyes blinked once: the transparent underlids sliding sideways, the translucent overlids sliding up from their pouch under the eyes. The shreeliala had the slash of an overseer tattooed on the lilac scales of the crown of its head; beneath it was the emerald dot that said that it was a member of the Council. There was another mark, too: a short, yellow-white bar, bulging slightly at either end: this shreeliala possessed “bones-of-air”—a mutation that caused some shreeliala to have lightweight, air-pocketed bones, which meant it could never sink into the Great Darkness to rest with its own kind, the normal shreeliala with what they call “bones-of-stone.” Instead, this shreeliala would be burned here on the island when it died, in the caldera at the summit of Blackstone—the place the shreeliala call the Pit.

Avariel watched my approach with a careful almost-smile on her face; the Venusian watched as well, but I knew that attempting to read any human emotion into that face would be a mistake. “Avariel,” I said when I reached their table. “I thought I might find you here.”

She looked … older. Somehow, I hadn’t expected that. There were severe lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there before, and creases around her neck. Gray had settled in the dark brown hair of her temples. Her arms were covered with white patches of scars, some of them new. But she was still muscular and fit. Still the athlete, ready to conquer any physical task to which she set herself.

Her smile flickered. Settled. “Tomio,” she answered flatly. The shreeliala’s huge eyes swiveled in their sockets as it looked from her to me. Bubbles thrashed their way through the clear plastic pipes connecting its gill bubbler to the tank on its back. “I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Really?” I answered, returning her meaningless smile. “After the Green Council’s decision? I thought you’d expect me to come here—if only because I knew you’d be the first one here.”

“Tomio …” A sigh. Her fingertips tapped an aimless rhythm on the tabletop near her ale. “There’s no going back to what we were. I’m sorry. You really shouldn’t have come here.”

I raised my hand. “Uh-uh,” I said. “Our relationship isn’t at issue. You know, despite everything, I would have come if you’d asked, if you’d stayed in touch after …” I gestured at the empty space below the stumps of my legs and the floor.

“Don’t lay that guilt at my door, Tomio,” she said. “I won’t accept it.”

The shreeliala seemed to hiss, spraying a fine mist of water from its mouth; it adjusted the bubbler. The salty droplets pooled on the varnish of the table; we all looked at it. “The humans know one another?” Heh hoomanths noah won hunover? It had been a long time since I’d heard the shreeliala accent; I had to replay the comment in my head before I understood what it had said, by which time Avariel had already answered.

“Tomia was here with me the last time, Hasalalo,” she said. “We went down into the Great Darkness together.” The shreeliala nodded. The last time … The water going from green to blue to black. I’d thought it would be easy. I thought we’d just swim down and down until we reached the bottom …

Avariel’s comment was all that was needed; Hasalalo seemed to know immediately what she referred to, even if for the short-lived shreeliala the events of fifteen Earth years ago were a generation removed. Hasalalo, who looked to be in his prime years, probably hadn’t been alive then, or was just a newly sprouted bud.

“Will it …?” Hasalalo stumbled over the pronoun, and spat water again. “I mean, he be going with you this time?”

“No,” Avariel answered. Her gaze was on me, and the smile had seemingly vanished. “He won’t. In fact, he shouldn’t be here now.”

She started to get up; I reached out and found her arm.

“Avariel, I’m sorry. Really. Please, don’t go.” In the dim light, her eyes were bright with reflections. “The Great Darkness took my legs,” I said. “I think that’s all the motivation I need. Avariel, you knew you were coming back as soon as the Green Council would allow it, but you weren’t sure that I would. I wasn’t the one who left the relationship as soon as possible after I was hurt.” I saw a trail of moisture on her face, and I suddenly hated myself. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was unfair.”

“No,” she answered, very softly. “I don’t think that was unfair at all.”

“Then we could still do this together?” Optimism rose like a bird …

“No.”… and plummeted stricken back to the floor. “But I understand why you had to ask.”

Neither of us said anything for long seconds after that. Avariel sighed and reached down below her chair, pulling up a backpack. She put the straps around her shoulders and cinched the left side tightly, muscles knotting along her jaw. “Getting to the bottom of the Great Darkness was the only time I failed at something I tried,” she answered finally. “That’s why I’m here.” Avariel adjusted the other strap and got to her feet, hefting the pack. “People sometimes need something so badly that they’d sacrifice nearly anything to attain it,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to be any other way. Not for me.”

I thought it was you, I wanted to tell her. I thought it was you that I needed like that. Now, I just don’t know, and I thought if I saw you again, I might find out. “I understand,” was all I said.

“I hope you do,” she said, slinging the pack over her shoulder, then her voice and her face softened. “I never wanted to hurt you, Tomio—I hope you can believe that, at least. I’m sorry I wasn’t the type of person who could share her life with you, and maybe that was more my fault than yours.”

I shrugged back at her. “If you had been that person, I probably wouldn’t have wanted you so much,” I told her.

She lifted her chin at that, then her gaze slid over to Hasalalo. “Make the arrangements, Hasalalo,” she told the Venusian. “I’ll come to you tomorrow with the final part of the fee, and we’ll do this.”

“Yes, Avariel.” Yessh … With a hiss and a lisp. The liquid affirmation came wafting over the table laden with the odor of cinnamon. Avariel nodded once before turning and leaving.

After Avariel had gone, I looked at Hasalalo; it looked at me. “So you were the other human who descended with her,” it said, halfway between question and statement. “You were the reason she never reached the bottom of the Great Darkness, and saw the ancestor-bones or the Lights-in-Water.”

“Yeah,” I told it. “It was my fault.” The words tasted far more bitter than I intended, and I tried to temper them with a smile that I wasn’t sure the shreeliala would understand. It only nodded.

“I’ll never see the Great Darkness or the Lights-In-Water either,” it said, and it touched the pale bar tattooed on its head. Its gill bubbler hissed; it sounded like a sigh.

I didn’t quite know what to say to that. I knew from my time on Venus that when a shreeliala dies anywhere on this world, no matter how far away the colony might be, its body is carried out to the Great Darkness—a deep canyon just off the shore of Blackstone Mountain—with great ceremony by a group of shreeliala dedicated to that task: “priests” might be the best term, but given that the shreeliala don’t have organized religions in the sense that we think of them, it’s also a very wrong term. (Hell, I wasn’t entirely certain how the shreeliala even reproduced, though I’m certain some of the scientists stationed here could have told me.) The body is released over the Great Darkness with a prayer—or maybe it’s just a ritual statement—and, shreeliala bodies with bones-of-stone being heavier than water, the dead one drifts steadily down through the blackness of the waters into the depths toward …

… well, toward whatever’s at the bottom, which no human has ever seen. We know what the Great Darkness is: once a long, vertical hollow in the volcanic rock, perhaps a lava tube reaching up from the plumes far, far below. But the thin roof of the vertical cavern collapsed under the corrosion and weight of the water above it, leaving the Great Darkness. Beyond that, the shreeliala are closemouthed about it, and they refuse to allow any of our cameras or robotic instruments to accompany any of the bodies on its journey: as sentient beings, we have to respect that, and we have. To them, it’s a sacred place, and not to be violated.

But they did, once, allow Avariel and myself to undertake the journey, on our own. And we failed. Or, rather, I failed and therefore Avariel also failed.

I saw a flash, or thought I did, and something like an undersea wave pummeled me and I hit the side of the canyon. Rocks began to fall, and I shouted for Avariel, but then I felt the crushing pain, and … When I awoke again, I was back in Blackstone, in the hospital. Or, at least, half of me was …

I must have spent too long in reverie, because Hasalalo’s bubbler hissed again as it spoke. “You and Avariel were … lovers? That’s not a relationship we can understand.”

“Neither can we, most of the time,” I told it.

Hasalalo burbled more to itself, its large eyes blinking and its hands spreading so that I could see the translucent, speckled webbing between the long fingers. The skin glistened with the gel the shreeliala use to retain moisture when they’re on land. “Why did you want to see the Great Darkness and the Lights-in-Water?” it asked. “Before.”

“I didn’t, particularly.”

Hasalalo blinked. It seemed to be thinking through the English. “It … If … How …” It stopped. Breathed. “Then why?” it asked.

“Avariel wanted it. And I wanted Avariel.”

Hasalalo shivered. I seemed to remember that was the Venusian equivalent of a human shrug. “That is the explanation?”

I grinned at the shreeliala. “It’s all I got,” I told it. “Maybe my grandmother could explain it better for you—if you ever meet her.”

The memories flooded back with that.

—–—

The affair was more or less in honor of Avariel. I say “more or less” because back then Obaasan Evako arranged gatherings every month or so whether there was an excuse or not. Avariel had just completed the ascent of the previously unconquered eastern cliffs of Olympus Mons on Mars, an expedition sponsored by the family company Norkohn Shuttles—our PR department was already churning out ads trumpeting our involvement. I’d been on the support team, my own climb confined to a leisurely ascent of the lower lava flows. I had shivered a lot in the shelter of Base One while Avariel and her support team of genuine climbers went on; they’d go to Base Two, and Avariel would finish the climb solo—as she always did.

She and I were lovers already; I’d wondered about that at first, suspicious that the primary reason she’d come to my bed was because I’d been the one who had talked Obaasan Evako into parting with the grant for the climb. Still, we were good lovers, comfortable with each other. We were friends. I was well on the way to considering making the relationship more permanent, in love with the idea of being in love.

Mobile fabrics were the fashion that season. Most of the people wearing them shouldn’t have been, though I thought Avariel looked fine. Her blouse, restless, crawled slowly over her shoulders. I’d be talking to her, but my gaze would be snagged by her neckline slipping suggestively lower: that was a good time for voyeurs.

The evening was turning cool and I was getting tired of smiling at people I really didn’t like that well. I found Avariel in the garden and detached her from the gaggle of admirers around her. The hover-lamps had just turned themselves on, flickering like huge fireflies around the lawn while Mount Fuji turned golden on the horizon. Touching her arm, I inclined my head to the blaze of lights that was the house. “Let’s go inside. I’ve a few people you should meet.”

She nodded and made polite noises to her crowd, but when we were away from them, she sighed. “Thanks. I’ve been trying to lose them for the last half an hour. I have to say that sometimes I miss being all alone up on Olympus Mons. Shame on you, Tomio, for leaving me to those wolves.”

“Part of the bane of being the host.”

The party was noisier and brighter and more crowded inside: lots of glitter, meaningless laughter, and full glasses. As we stood watching in the doorway, Obaasan Evako waved to us from where the caterers were setting the buffet. “Tomio!” she called loudly. “You’ve been hiding the guest of honor from me all evening. I refuse to be neglected any longer. Bring her here.”

An imperious gesture accompanied the command. Those nearby tittered and smiled before turning back to their drinks.

I grinned. Avariel, glancing from me to my grandmother, smiled uncertainly in my direction. Obaasan could be intimidating to those who didn’t know her; I could feel Avariel’s fingers digging into the skin of my arm. Obaasan Evako was a small, thin woman; half Japanese and half northern European, with short, white hair, and a well-wrinkled face. She exuded energy and purpose, carrying a habitual frown on her lips. To those she wanted to leave with the impression, she was hard, brittle ice; most of the family knew better. “Don’t worry,” I whispered to Avariel. “She’s really a lamb.”

Avariel’s glance told me that she didn’t believe me. We made our way over to my grandmother, who stood waiting, one foot tapping the carpet. “Counteffia no Regentia Norkohn,” Avariel said, using Obaasan’s full title from the Asian Liánméng, and bowing as proper etiquette required.

Obaasan looked Avariel up and down as if she were a piece of furniture. Then she glanced at me. She spoke in Mandarin, not Japanese or English. “I’m surprised at you, Tomio. She’s not your type. When you talked about this Olympus Mons business, I expected to see one of the usual pieces of pretty fluff you drag down here.”

“I’m not fluff, Counteffia”—that from Avariel, who had straightened and now looked more irritated than flustered—“I can talk and I even understand what people say about me,” she answered in heavily accented Mandarin.

That snapped Obaasan’s head around. She stared at Avariel with line-trapped eyes, then nodded. “Good. See that you manage to stay unfluffy. It’s too damn easy to become comfortable. By the way, I assume you realize that your outfit doesn’t flatter you at all. Stay away from fashions unless they enhance your image. I’d use simpler and more classic clothing with that body.”

Avariel blinked. “Counteffia—” she began, but Obaasan cut her off with a wave of a thin hand. “Call me Evako. Anybody who can make Tomio behave sensibly deserves the courtesy of familiarity—he’s been paying more attention to the business lately, if only because I told him that he needed to pay back the sponsorship of your climb.”

“I want to thank you for that.”

“It was a waste of money.”

Another blink. “I’m sorry you feel that way …”

“Let me finish, child. It was a waste of money unless it’s finally taught Tomio what can be accomplished when you want something badly enough. He’s had everything too easily, and it’s ruined him. I told his parents it would.”

Avariel glanced back at me and saw that I was still grinning. She managed to look puzzled and faltered into a defense. “Tomio was a great help to me. Without him—”

“Bah!” With another wave of her hand. “Without him, you’d still have managed the climb, one way or another. You’d have found some other funding. Don’t delude yourself on that. Having Norkohn’s backing was convenient, but the loss of it wouldn’t have stopped you.” Then she gave her the briefest of smiles; it smoothed her face. “Gods, child, if you don’t allow us elders our bluntness, how am I ever going to convince the idiots around here that I’m not someone they can walk over?”

“I … don’t think that’s anything you need to worry about.”

“Oh, you’d be wrong. You’ll need to do the same. Let me tell you another truth. What you do is ultimately meaningless. You climb a thing or attempt things so that you’ll be the first one to accomplish it, so you’ll get to engrave your name in the record books. But that’s emptiness. You also climbed Rheasilvia’s central peak on Vesta, four years ago, and two years ago were the first person to take a submersible down through Europa’s ice pack to the liquid ocean below. But beyond that, do you know either Europa or Vesta? You climbed Olympus Mons, yes, but do you know Mars as a result? No—you made your climb and you left. You’ve no relationship with the places you’ve gone. Just like you have no real relationship with my Tomio.”

It was my turn to protest at that. “Obaasan,” I began, but she lifted her hand toward me without taking her gaze from Avariel. “I can tell that you’d be pretty if you wanted to make the effort,” Obaasan said to her. “You’re neither beautiful nor stunning, mind you, and I’m sorry if that bothers you, but you really don’t want false flattery. Still, you’d be easily as attractive as most of the people here tonight if you’d taken the hours they did to get ready. Yet you didn’t bother: very little cosmetics, no gloss, no fakery except that mistake of a blouse, which you probably chose because you thought it was expected. All that’s good. You look like someone out of the ordinary the way you are, while if you tried for looks, you’d just be one within the multitude. Well, I’m like that, also. I act just differently enough that no one makes the mistake of treating me like all the people I’d resemble otherwise. It’s a good trick. Keep it. Teach it to Tomio, too, while you’re about it. He’ll try to learn if only because he’s in love with you.”

“Obaasan—” I tried again, and this time I got a glance.

“Oh, she already knows it, Tomio. She’s too smart not to have seen it, and you’re just damned lucky that she’s not taken more advantage of your vulnerability. You should try to keep her, if you can, but it’ll take some doing. I don’t know if either of you are up to the task. You’re another little cliff she needed to scale, and though I love you, Tomio, you’re still trying to figure out what it is you want in life.”

Obaasan Evako gave a little start then, her mouth twisting back into a frown. “I’ve forgotten to check with the caterer about the wine. He’ll try putting it on ice again, and it should be served chilled, not cold. I want to talk to you later, Avariel; you can tell me how Norkohn’s going to get its money’s worth from this Venus expedition. Tomio, play host while I convince the caterer that it’s his decision to serve food the proper way.”

With that, she left us, moving away with her quick, unstoppable stride, already calling out loudly for the head caterer. Avariel laughed once, more in relief than anything else. “Good God. You might have warned me,” she said, staring at Obaasan’s wake.

“Hey, she likes you.”

“What does she do when she hates someone?” I saw her face scrunch into a scowl. “She doesn’t know me as well as she thinks she does.”

“You’d be surprised at what she probably knows.”

“Uh-huh.” Avariel glanced toward the bar and the restless tide of people around it. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not. “After that, I think I need a drink,” she said.

I waved the bartender over to our table as thunder from outside rattled the windows and Hasalalo burbled in its gill bubbler. “What do you have that passes for Scotch?” I asked her. She was another adapted human native: even though her skin was brown, there was still a sense of pallor to her that only came with the eternal lack of sunlight here; her eyes had been surgically altered, the iris and pupil widened and a protective underlid added much like that of the shreeliala. There was webbing between her long, extended fingers also, and the twin lines of gills were on her neck, with long, scarlet fronds that said they’d been there a long time.

“If you want genuine, it’s expensive,” she told me. “If you’ll take the local variety, it’s cheap enough.”

“Expensive,” I told her. “I’ve had the local.”

She sniffed and glanced at Hasalalo. “Hasalalo?” she asked—which told me that she knew it fairly well. Hasalalo didn’t reply immediately, and I prodded its arm.

“Nothing?” I asked the shreeliala. “I’m buying. Or rather, my pension fund is buying.” Hasalalo shook its head, and the bartender left. “You’re sure?” I asked it. “I know you shreeliala don’t care for our particular poisons, but I knew a few of you who could slam back sugar water like crazy.”

It ignored what I said entirely. Staring at me, it said, “You didn’t care if you saw the Lights-in-Water or the bones at the bottom of the Great Darkness? That’s what I want, more than anything. That’s why I pushed the Green Council to let Avariel come back. She said she would tell me what she saw in the Great Darkness, what my body will never experience with bones-of-air.”

“Bones-of-air,” I mused. “That’s all I have, now.”

I meant it as a joke. Hasalalo’s hissing was louder this time, more emphatic, and its voice had a timbre I’d rarely heard in shreeliala before. “I thought you would understand,” it said, though I wasn’t sure if that was agreement, sarcasm, or denial. “Have you seen the Pit, where those of us with bones-of-air go?”

I hadn’t, though sitting with Hasalalo, I wondered why. I knew about the Pit, the cauldron at the top of Blackstone Mountain, but Avariel had only glanced at the Blackstone’s paltry heights—no challenge to someone with her athletic ability—and shrugged. She’d had no interest in a walk to the heights, only in her descent to where no human had gone before, so therefore I had expressed no interest either. But that seemed too much to explain to Hasalalo, so I only shook my head.

It burbled some more, and, pushing away its chair, rose to its feet: twin scaled, long flippers with webbing extending down between the legs past the knobs of knees, far more suited to water than to land. On the land, shreeliala waddled rather than walked. “Come,” it said, and gestured. I rose from my own seat.

“It’s a long walk to the Pit,” I told it, “and on the steep side.” I gestured at the space where my legs should have been. “Do you think …?”

It stared at me with huge eyes that blinked wetly. From the tank on its back, a nozzle hissed and sprayed thick, gelid water over the shreeliala. “Come,” it said again. The command in its voice reminded me of the way Obaasan Evako spoke.

I came, calling to the bartender that I’d be back for that Scotch later. She grimaced, clearly annoyed, though whether it was with me or Hasalalo or both of us, I couldn’t tell. She shook her head as we left.

I shouldn’t have worried about the walk. As we left the bar, an open-topped scooter hurried quickly over through the rain from somewhere farther down the street, driven by another shreeliala, illuminated by flashes of lightning and accompanied by thunder. Hasalalo entered the small cab behind the driver, then gestured to me. “Come,” it said again. As I slid into the seat alongside it, Hasalalo leaned forward and said something to the driver in English: the shreeliala never spoke anything but English while on land. The driver nodded; the scooter whined and complained as it made its way away from the harbor. We moved back up Blackstone’s single road toward the plateau on which the port sat, and beyond it—now along an unpaved, potholed trail—toward the caldera that sat near Blackstone’s summit. The hot spot in the crust that had created both Blackstone and the Great Darkness had moved on millennia ago and was undoubtedly building up a new island somewhere to the northwest. Once, this place would have been a steaming, hissing hell where the eternal rain hammered at sputtering lava flows. No more; the volcano of Blackstone was long dormant and cold. The driver stopped near the rim of the crumbling crater, and we got out into a driving rain, with lightning crackling around us. I’d thumbed on my rainshield as soon as we’d left the bar; Hasalalo seemed to relish the wetness.

Here, on the highest mountain that Venus had to offer, modest as it was, I could look out at the unbroken sweep of the Always Sea—at least to what the storm allowed me to see. I thought that, out past Blackstone Bay, where the long ocean swells started, I could glimpse a darker green-blue against the lighter gray-green: the Great Darkness.

I could smell the caldera long before I could see it. We made our way slowly over the broken, eroded volcanic rock to where we could look down, and I wished that the rainshield could keep out odors as well as rain.

The caldera stank of rotting flesh. Shreeliala bodies, in various stages of decomposition, were scattered down the sides of the caldera in front of us, some of them half-draped over the slope just in front of us, as if they’d been tossed aside like so much unwanted trash. The floor of the crater was littered with their bones, flashing white in the erratic lightning flashes. Wrigglers—the blue-green, maggotlike worms that were one of Venus’s few land creatures—fed on the decaying matter. I gagged at the smell of rotting flesh and had to fight to keep my last meal in my stomach.

Hasalalo was staring down with me, though I couldn’t read the expression on its face to see if it matched the horror on mine. I looked more closely at the closest skeletons to us. Nested in the bones, I saw small clusters of rounded pebbles, rocks unlike any of the volcanic variety on Blackstone. Little groups of them were plentiful, almost as plentiful as the bones. I crouched down to look more closely: the stones were smoothed on their ridges though the rest of the rock was rough, as if they’d already been in a tumbler for a few hours. I glanced at Hasalalo and pointed to the nearest pile: four or five of the stones caged under the curve of a shreeliala’s ribs. “May I …?” I asked Hasalalo, who gave me an almost perfect human shrug. I hoped it meant the same thing and reached down for one of the stones, carefully trying to avoid touching the bones that enclosed it. I managed to fish one out between two fingers and stood up, looking at it closely. In my hand, rain no longer varnished its surface; it dried quickly almost as if the stone was absorbing the water. The stone was reddish, with light gray veins marbling it; the higher surfaces were almost polished, the lower ones still had lots of surface irregularities. I turned it in my fingers, looking at the black, glassy highlights and wondering how it would look after I ran it through my tumbler. Blackstone Mountain. The Pit. Venus. “Can I keep this?” I asked Hasalalo.

Its bubbler hissed. Hasalalo was watching me. Its underlids slid over its eyes and remained there as the rain started to pelt down harder: no longer a sheeter, but now what the locals called a “pounder.” “Why?” it asked.

I reached into my pocket with my free hand and pulled out my little collection of polished rocks, displaying them to Hasalalo in my palm. “It’s amazing what a rock looks like when you polish it like this. They become little jewels: the essence of the stone. Or maybe it’s the truth inside the stone. It’s something I do, everywhere I go. See, this one: it’s a rock I took from the beach the last time I was here.” Blue-black glass, so finely polished that you could see the darker imperfections floating inside like planets nested in a dark nebula.

Hasalo leaned over my hand and stretched out a web-snaggled finger to touch it. “This is one of the black stones?”

I nodded. “Pretty, isn’t it? I’d like to do the same with this stone from the pit, just to see how it comes out, to see what beauty it’s hiding.”

“Do you know what you hold?”

I shook my head.

A hiss from the bubbler. “You know what happens to those of bones-of-stone when they die?”

“Yes. You release the bodies over the Great Darkness. There’s something about reincarnation for a few, and, well, your gods … umm, the Lights-in-Water are down there and, uh …” My voice trailed off. The truth was that while I knew the shreeliala had a complex mythology that revolved around the Great Darkness, all that Avariel had cared about was that no human had ever been all the way to the bottom of the Great Darkness and that she’d be the first. Therefore, that was all I cared about, too. Just as I hadn’t bothered to learn how the shreeliala reproduced, I’d also ignored their beliefs. I figured the way they dealt with death was like our own tales of death and afterlife: ancient myth and fantasy, with none of it real.

“Those with bones-of-stone fall into the Great Darkness,” Hasalalo continued. If it was annoyed at my bumbling narrative of their beliefs, I couldn’t tell. “The Lights-in-Water feed on their flesh, leaving behind their bones, and among the bones are also their stomach-stones. Sometimes, the Lights-in-Water find a particularly beautiful stomach-stone, and they take that stomach-stone back up out of the Great Darkness and place the stone where a bud-mother can find it, and when the bud-mother swallows it, it sprouts a new shreeliala, so that each shreeliala may come back to life again. That’s the possibility that awaits most shreeliala in the Great Darkness, but not those of bones-of-air. I’ve talked to the Eldest of us, and they say that the Pit has always been the same. The Lights-in-Water can’t come here, so the stomach-stones left here never leave, and those who rot here are never reborn.”

Hasalalo gestured to encompass Blackstone Mountain. “All this came to be because those of bones-of-air went into the Great Darkness by tying rocks around their bodies against all warnings, and the Lights-in-Water of the Always Sea grew angry and vomited up the bones-of-air in a fury of glowing rocks, until the sea bottom rose above the Always Sea as a sign to never do that again. Since then, all of us with bones-of-air have been placed here and are forbidden the Great Darkness. I know Avariel believes this is just superstition, and so you probably think the same. The Lights-in-Water, their choosing of the stomach-stones, everything about the Great Darkness is only myth. Maybe it is. Maybe there’s no difference between what happens to those with bones-of-air and bones-of-stone. This is why I worked with the Green Council to allow Avariel to come back. She said she would tell me what she finds at the bottom of the Great Darkness. If she does, I will know. We will all know.”

That was by far the longest speech I had ever heard a shreeliala make. Through most of it I was staring at the stone I was holding: a “stomach-stone,” a gastrolith, I knew now. Part of me wanted to drop it: this had been in the gizzard of one of the dead shreeliala, which explained how it had been partially polished, grinding the sea plants that the shreeliala ate.

“Take the stone and find the truth inside it,” Hasalalo told me as I hesitated. “I wish to see it afterward.”

I rubbed the stone between my fingers, thinking I could almost feel slime coating it, as if it had just been vomited up. I shivered, but I closed my fingers around it as Hasalalo stared at me. “All right,” I told it. “I’ll get it started tonight. It’ll take a week or more, though. It takes a lot of time to get to the truth, as you put it.”

Hasalalo seemed to sniff. “If that is so, then why does Avariel never stay anywhere very long? Why do you do the same?”

To that echo of what Obaasan Evako had once said, I had no answer at all.

After I left Hasalalo back at Venus Genetrix, after I stopped at my hotel room and removed the rock tumbler I kept in my luggage and started the gastrolith’s polishing, I went to see Avariel. I knew where she’d be: down Blackstone’s single street to where it plunged into a tunnel of Plexiglas and steel and down under the slow waves to Undersea Port proper.

There, the light was dim and green—more suited to shreeliala eyes than ours—and the odor of brine and fish dominated, mingling with the cinnamon exhalations of shreeliala. Here were the markets for the fish and kelp and other niceties that formed the trade between shreeliala and human; here were the water-filled chambers where human delegates and negotiators could meet with shreeliala officials. Here was the interface between two worlds and two species.

Avariel and her support crew had taken one of the subs docked there. The street hatch was open, so I went in. I found her in the lower chamber, checking out the diving equipment with a man who’d been part of our support crew last time: Mikhail. “… the fiddling I did with the CCR should give you at least another two hours if you need it. You bought the best rebreather on the market, I know, but now it’s better,” he was saying to her.

“I hope so,” Avariel said, then she saw me. She gave me the expression of someone suffering from severe acid reflux. “Mikhail,” she said, “why don’t you check with Patrick on the com unit?”

Mikhail raised a dark eyebrow toward me, the brow rising higher and his mud-brown eyes widening slightly as he noted my missing legs. “Sure,” he said. He was trying not to stare at me. “I’ll do that. Hey, Tomio.”

“Mikhail. Good to see you again.” The polite thing you say when you’re really saying nothing at all.

“You, too,” he answered, words equally as empty. Then he glanced at Avariel, shrugged, and left, climbing the ladder to the upper compartment. I watched his legs disappear, but Avariel’s voice pulled me back.

“What do you want, Tomio? I’m rather busy right now.”

“You already know.”

“And I already gave you the answer. No, you can’t go with me. Not this time.” I saw her gaze fall down past my waist to the emptiness there.

“I can still swim,” I told her, stomping the foot end of the prosthetic field for emphasis. The sole of the shoe was rubber; there wasn’t much sound, even in the hard-walled chamber. “That’s not the problem.”

“No,” she answered quietly, “that’s not the problem at all.”

“You’re taking Mikhail? Or Patrick?”

She was already shaking her head. “I’m doing this alone.”

“That’s ridiculous. And foolish.”

She gave a cough that might have been a laugh. “Is it? Were you there when I climbed the last cliffs at Olympus Mons? That final ascent …”

“I know,” I told her. “You did it on your own. Doesn’t make it any less—” I stopped. “Stupid” was the word on my lips. I could see from her face that she knew it, too. I could also see that the more I argued, the more her answer to me wasn’t going to change, and I could also tell from the release of tension in my gut that I’d wanted her to tell me “no”—because the ghost that I was chasing didn’t involve returning to where the Great Darkness had taken my legs. That ghost was standing in front of me.

Avariel took a long breath, closing her eyes momentarily as if composing words in her head. Then she looked at me again, her eyes bright. “Look, Tomio. I know what I am: an adrenaline junkie, someone who likes to push the envelope, to do things that no one else has done. And yeah, I like the attention that gets me, too. Your grandmother had me tagged pretty well, and I know myself well enough to admit it now. You—I don’t think you ever knew what you wanted. After your accident in the Great Darkness …” She caught her upper lip in her teeth momentarily, as if biting back something. Mikhail told me afterward that when Avariel came for me, my legs were already gone, crudely guillotined from my body by the rocks. She managed to put tourniquets around the stumps and take me back up to the sub before I entirely bled out. When I came back to consciousness, several days later, she’d already left Venus. “I’m not proud that I left you. But you and me …” Her head shook. I waited. “It wasn’t going to work. I think you knew that as much as I did.”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “At the time, I had other things on my mind, like wondering when I’d ever walk again.”

She sucked in her breath, a hiss like Hasalalo’s bubbler, and I was suddenly repentant. “All right,” I told her, “can I at least be there tomorrow when you dive? I could help Mikhail and Patrick up top.”

I thought she was going to say no once more. She looked away from me, and down to the dive equipment on the floor. Her head was still shaking, but she took a step toward me, grabbing my hands and looking up into my face. I could see the lines on her face, carved deeper than I remembered, the brown puffiness under her eyes, the small scars on her skin from the burn regeneration. Her fingers pressed mine, tightly.

It was the closest we’d been since the night she’d left me, in the hospital here.

“If that’s what you want,” she said, “then all right, for what we once were, for what happened last time.” Then she let go of my hands and stepped back. “If you’re going to be here, then at least help me stow this crap,” she said.

—–—

The sub was stationed over the broken rim of the Great Darkness, seemingly perched on great legs of blue-white spotlights, as insubstantial as my own. The Always Sea was deepening here, sloping down the submerged flanks of the volcano that was Blackstone Mountain. Staring out the wide, transparent ports of the sub, I could see several shreeliala gathered at the rim of the Great Darkness below us, with the rounded, woven structures of the shreeliala’s Blackstone Village (our name for it, not theirs) receding away into the green-blue distance toward where its seaweed-draped outskirts met the human buildings of Undersea Port.

On the rim of the Great Darkness, a great and wide forest of blue-black kelp undulated in the slow currents of the Always Sea. The shreeliala were gathered above the canopy of kelp, and I could see the bubbling forms of shreeliala speech as they spoke amongst themselves. The words of the shreeliala language are essentially shaped water-and-air-bubble structures (which is why they resort to English when out of the water), as much visual as audible. The scientists studying their language are still trying to discern the grammar and construction and putting together a dictionary, but I doubt that any human is ever going to be able to “speak” or understand shreeliala without mechanical help.

Smelling cinnamon, I spoke aloud. “I wonder what they’re saying?” Hasalalo, aboard the sub with us, peered over my shoulder to the scene below.

“They’re not pleased that this is happening,” it said. “Many of us, especially those of bones-of-stone, weren’t pleased with the Green Council’s decision. They say it is bones-of-air stupidity to permit this.” A long finger stroked the marking on its skull, reflexively.

“They’re not going to try to stop us, are they?” Mikhail asked from his console. Mikhail’s finger hovered above the com button. On the screen in front of him, we could see Avariel in the dive chamber, with Patrick helping her fit on the last of her gear.

Hasalalo’s eyes widened. “They don’t think they’ll have to. The Lights-in-Water will do that for them.”

Mikhail laughed at that, and his finger moved away from the com. “The Lights-in-Water haven’t met Avariel. That woman’s got a nasty mean streak for people who get in her way.” He chuckled again, then glanced at me. The chuckle died.

“Is that what you think?” I asked Hasalalo. “The Lights-in-Water will stop Avariel?”

It looked at me placidly. The bubbler gurgled and spat water. “They stopped you.”

Movement. A flash of brilliance accompanied the pain. Then nothing until I woke up in the hospital. “It was a rockfall that stopped me. I got too close to the edge and hit something unstable,” I told it.

“I wonder,” Hasalalo answered, “what truth was buried inside those rocks that took your legs?”

I started to answer it, but Avariel’s voice came over the com and the holoscreens lit up around the compartment. “Going live,” she said, her voice muffled through the rebreather. “Do you have the feed, Mikhail?”

“Got it,” Mikhail answered. “Everything looks good here.”

“Fine. I’m going down, then. Wish me luck.”

Luck, I whispered under my breath. “No luck needed,” Mikhail told her. “You got this. Piece of cake.”

The image on the holoscreens bounced and swirled, then filled with bubbles as the dive hatch filled with water and opened for her. Avariel swam out into the haze of the sub’s lights, the view on the screen swaying dizzily as she looked up and the camera on her mask picked up the sub above her. Our lights overloaded the camera until it dimmed, then opened up again as she glanced over at the shreeliala gathered at the lips of the canyon, watching her and speaking to each other in a rush of half-glimpsed water shapes. Behind us, we heard Patrick clamber up the metal ladder into our chamber and settle down by the com unit.

“Hey, Avariel, you’re green across the board here,” Patrick said. “Ready?”

She looked down, and we saw the blue-black below that the sub’s light could not penetrate. Her arm came into view, laden with her dive watch and depth instrumentation. “Everything looks green here, too,” she said. “Patrick, Mikhail, I’m heading down.”

I tried not to feel insulted by the lack of any reference to me.

On the screens, we watched the water around her slowly darken and the readout from her depth gauge climb just as slowly. She stayed near the edge of the canyon wall, as we had both done the last time, but not—I noted—as closely as I had clung to it. As the sub’s light faded, she switched on the mask’s headlamps, and we could occasionally catch glimpses of the jagged, volcanic rock of the lava tube that was the Great Darkness, adorned with Venusian kelp and the creatures who lived there amongst the rocks and vegetation.

I remembered that much myself: the walls of the Great Darkness had been alive in front of me. I saw anglerworms dangling their fish-shaped heads outward into the water, enticing the snaggle-mouthed puffers to come close enough to be speared by the poisoned lance of their tongues. I watched a wave of green painters undulate past me, the inky dye from their bodies leaving swirling trails of purple as they passed. Snorting shells, with their long spires and carapaces swirled with brilliant blues, yellows, and reds belched air as they made their way along the ledges of the Great Darkness. The shallow waters of the Always Sea teemed with life, everywhere. There were species unseen by any human to be discovered everywhere we looked and we could have spent days cataloging and describing them, but Avariel was intent only on going down into the blackness …

Down, and down. I knew that Avariel would be starting to feel the pressure building against her flexible suit, which would be hardening against the weight of the water. The suit she wore was a hybrid: self-contained and powered only by Avariel’s legs, but also a miniature “vessel” that would allow her to reach depths that an individual diver would not be able to reach. Because for religious reasons, the shreeliala had refused to allow us to probe the Great Darkness with remote-controlled vehicles, we had no idea of the actual depth of the lava tube though indirect estimates suggested that it was no more than eight hundred meters.

The hissing of the rebreather would be loud in her ears, and the canyon wall she followed down became stripped of the kelp, which needed the faint, cloud-shielded sunlight that was mostly nonexistent below seventy-five to one hundred meters. Instead, the rocks were dotted with the gray-white tubes of puff-worms and the lacy, swollen cells of prison-crabs, laden with the bones of the fish they’d snagged with their long, prehensile tails.

“I’m at 210 meters,” Avariel said, her voice becoming distorted in pitch as the rebreather added more helium and neon to the air she was breathing. I knew why she mentioned it: that’s where I’d had my accident, where she’d been forced to abandon the quest the last time. She was well away from the canyon wall now, the lights on her mask illuminating only dark, empty water. She wasn’t going to repeat my “mistake.”

The dive meter display showed 280 meters when it happened.

“There’s something …” they heard Avariel say. “Coming up from below. Lights …” In the viewscreen, the camera swayed as she looked down, and we saw a swarm of firefly lights, green and cold, swirling below like a flock of phosphorescent birds, and rising, rising as they grew larger. “I can feel them …”

The sense of something approaching … then the pain, the terrible pain that sent me whirling into unconsciousness …

“Avariel,” I said, leaning over Patrick’s console, “be careful …”

“I don’t believe—” she began, but the lights rushed inward: too bright, too huge, and the camera view tumbled wildly as they heard Avariel cry out. “No! Don’t …”

Then the screens all went dark at once, the readouts went to flat-line, and there was only the hiss of static in the speakers. “Avariel!” I shouted, though I knew already that it was too late. “Avariel!”

Silence. I heard Mikhail cursing at his console. “I’m taking us down,” he said. “We’ll go and get her.”

“No!” That was Hasalalo, its voice shrill through the bubbler. “That is not permitted. The Green Council forbids it. I forbid it.”

“Fuck both you and the Green Council!” Mikhail ranted. “We have to do something. Patrick, give me her last position.”

I put my hand on Mikhail’s shoulder; he pushed it away. “You can’t,” I told him. Patrick hadn’t moved, staring at all of us. “Avariel knew the risks.”

“And last time, she brought you back,” Mikhail answered.

“Not all of me,” I answered. “Some of me is still down there. She knew the risks,” I repeated. He stared at me. He cursed again, punching a closed fist on the console. A screen sparked in static at the punishment. Then he let his hands drop to his side.

We waited, hovering above the Great Darkness, until an hour after her air should have run out. Then, in furious silence and grief, we headed back to Undersea Port.

I stood at the shore of the Always Sea. The rain was a bare drizzler, fat drops falling from scudding, gray-black clouds as the wind frothed the tips of the low rollers coming in. Lightning from a storm near the horizon licked bright tongues into the sea. I’d left the rainshield behind in my room; if Venus wanted me to get wet, I’d oblige her and allow it to happen. I imagined the gods of Venus spitting on me from the eternal cloud banks, and laughing when one of the droplets hit me. I stared out toward the Great Darkness, half-believing I could see the darkness of it even though I knew that was impossible.

Avariel’s body never came back up. I imagined her bones, down there with all the others. With a few of mine, as well.

I heard the scrape of a flippered foot on the rocks and the hiss of a bubbler behind me, and glanced over my shoulder to see Hasalalo there. It stood alongside me, silent except for the noise of the bubbler. “The Green Council has closed the Great Darkness to all further human exploration,” it said. “None of your kind will ever do what Avariel attempted.”

It was staring at me. I took a long breath, then plunged my hand into my pocket. I pulled out the stomach-stone I’d taken from the pit. It shone in the rain and the diffuse light from the eternally clouded sky: marbled blue highlights in a swirling, orange-red matrix—gorgeous, and oddly heavy. “Here,” I told it. “You wanted to see the truth hiding in the stone. Here it is.” I took its hand and put the finished piece on its scaled flesh, the polished surface glinting like a wet jewel.

Hasalalo’s bubbler burbled as it stared, prodding the stone with a webbed finger. Its huge eyes looked up. “There was great beauty inside,” it said. “How could the Lights-in-Water not love such a thing if they could see it, if someone gave it to them?”

I nodded. I thought it would keep the stone, but Hasalalo handed the stomach-stone back to me; I put it in my pocket to nestle with the other stones: Avariel. Venus. The last time …

Neither of us said anything for a time, just watching the rain-pocked rollers coming in off the Always Sea. “You’ll be leaving,” Hasalalo said finally.

I shook my head. “No,” I told it. “I think I’ll stay here for a while. Maybe you were right about seeing truth. I’ve always moved around. For once, I think I’ll try staying long enough to see what’s underneath the surface. Maybe I’ll even figure out what the Lights-in-Water are.”

Hasalalo seemed to contemplate that. “You will live longer than me,” it said finally, slowly. “When I die, if you’re still here …” It stopped. It was staring out at the misty horizon, where the Great Darkness lay.

“If I’m still here …?” I prodded.

“They will throw my body into the Pit. After the wrigglers have taken my flesh, would you come for my stomach-stones? Would you find the truth inside them? And would you …”

Hasalalo didn’t finish, but it looked out toward the Great Darkness through the rain, and I knew what it wanted. I nodded. “I will,” I told it. “I promise.”