Old Venus

Pale Blue Memories

TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

1.

I GRABBED THE ARMS OF MY ACCELERATION CHAIR AS WE spun, our silver bullet of a rocket ship vomiting debris and air into the cold night of Venus’s stratosphere. Commander Heston James, Sr., flung himself from control panel to control panel, trying to regain control of our craft, but the Nazi missile had done its nasty work well.

From a distance, the great pearly orb of Venus had been a comfort to us. Our exciting destination. A place that beckoned adventure.

We would land, for our country. And strike a great blow against the German Reich, proving that the war machine of the United States of America was more powerful. The great Space Race that grew out of the guttering stalemate of the Great War saw Nazi moon-bases and stations matched by Allied forces in the final frontier. Now the race was on to claim a planet.

But the sneaky Nazi bastards, unable to beat us to the sister planet’s surface, shot us out of the sky with a missile that had boosted behind us from Earth, hiding in our rocket ship’s wake until right as we deorbited.

“Charles!” Commander James shouted at me, looking back over his shoulder. “Do we have communications?”

I’d been flipping switches and listening to static for the last ten minutes of terror. The faint, steady, reassuring pip from Earth was nowhere to be found. And our tumbling meant it would never be found until we stabilized.

Or it could mean all our antennas were snapped clean off.

“Charles!”

I shook my head at him. “No, Commander. Everything is off-line.”

In radio silence, we continued to fall out of the sky.

Commander James strained against the g-forces snapping at us to continue working his panels, fighting for control of his ship all the way down. A hero to the last breath.

Out of one of the small portholes I watched the expanse of white clouds beneath us spin past again and again.

All this was a punishment, I thought to myself, as the blood continued to rush up against the inside of my head and dizzy me. Like Daedalus, I’d flown too high and been burned. Now I was falling.

And falling.

People from my kind of family didn’t end up becoming astronauts. My kind of family had aunts and uncles who had to drink from the other fountains and couldn’t order stuff from the front.

My dad came from Jamaica, towing behind the rest of his family. They came looking for jobs and ended up working out in the Illinois countryside. White folk could tell Dad wasn’t white, but they weren’t sure what exactly he was, due to his kinky hair and skin that browned when he worked outside too long.

Dad said that back home they called him “high yellow,” which meant he was mixed race but looked more white than black. Folk up North were more uneasy about the idea of mixed-race people. In some ways, that made it harder for Dad. He was a living, walking example of miscegenation. A child of a white father and a black mother.

If you were one or the other, in America, he said, everyone knew exactly how to treat you. But being stuck somewhere in the middle left him pulled in directions that I couldn’t fathom.

He married a white woman: an even greater sin. We wouldn’t have been able to do that in the South, but in the North, as long as we kept to ourselves and didn’t “flaunt” it, people pretended it didn’t exist as long as my mother and father didn’t go out together.

And as for me, I took after my mother.

I remember sitting in front of the window, looking at my reflection, trying to get my father’s comb to stick in my hair like it did in his. But instead it would just slide out of my straggly, fine strands and fall to the floor.

My fair-skinned mother would find me crying in front of the mirror and ask me what was wrong. I never had the words to explain to her, and that would sometimes upset her more.

When I was five, my father sat me down. “I want to tell you where you came from,” he told me, his face serious, his gray eyes piercing my fidgety five-year-old soul. “Because it’s only once you know where we are from that you can understand who you really are.”

I nodded, like I understood the wisdom he was dropping on me. Mostly I was excited to be let into this circle of trust he was drawing around us. Because these were things we had to keep close to us, as if they were horrible secrets. And yet, in fact, it was just the truth about how we’d gotten where we were.

Sometimes simple truth was radical.

“Your forefathers come from the Ivory Coast, in far-off Africa. From across the seas,” he told me.

He taught me their names, and the name of the tribe his forefathers had once belonged to. “I once knew the dances, and some of the words, as they were passed on to me from my grandfather,” he told me with sad eyes. “But I have forgotten them. But I have not forgotten where I came from. And you can’t either. Your skin is pale, son, and that will be to your advantage in this world. You might go on to do great things here. But you have to know who we are.”

“Will we go back?” I asked, excited.

He looked at me for a long time. “I don’t know if there is a back to go back to, son. We live here. It is what we know. And what we need to know is how best to survive, and more importantly, thrive. Because a man should be able to live anywhere in the world and not suffer, do you understand? This is our home because we are here. And we are with each other.”

I don’t know if he believed it. But at five, looking up at his broad shoulders, the lesson embedded itself deep in me and took root.

Thirteen years later, I would be flying trainer aircraft and pushing myself to beat everyone around me. More kills, more daring stunts. I’d been training in languages while in school but left to help fight the Great War and Hitler’s minions.

I’d heard about the squadron of negro-only fighters in the sky, heard that bombers were asking for the Red Tails because of their record of flying close and protecting.

The Red Tails were breaking records in their section of the sky. I was secretly doing it over here. And one day I’d reveal myself. And it would be known that I was as good as any other pilot.

Only I was a ghost. A shadow person. A secret with my one drop of different blood.

And now I, Charles Stewart with my mixed blood, would die on the surface of Venus in a spectacular crash and no one would ever know what I’d truly accomplished, would they? No one would know I’d been as good as any white astronaut, and they hadn’t even known about me in their midst.

I’d flown too high.

No. That was the blood squeezing against my brain. I’d flown high. I was proud to have flown high!

We plunged through the thick clouds of Venus, and for a brief second I saw lush green vegetation and wide expanses of ocean.

Commander James cut himself free of his restraints, slamming into a bulkhead and cutting his head open.

“Keep calling out elevation, Davis,” he shouted back at the navigator, Tad Davis.

Tad began shouting out the numbers as we fell. Heston pulled Shepard Jefferson out of his chair and dragged him back on hands and knees deeper into the heart of the craft. I could hear banging and swearing.

Eric Smith, our geologist and general scientist, grabbed my arm from his position strapped in on my left. “I know communications is down, but patch me in anyway.” He stared out of the porthole. “I’m going to broadcast what I can make out as we go down, for the benefit of whoever might hear something.”

The ears of the world might be straining to hear us. And Eric was a scientist to the last. I linked his microphone to the radio. “You’re on, if we’re able to transmit,” I told him through gritted teeth.

“We’re spinning wildly,” Eric narrated, “but I’m sure I can see jungle out on the land we’re far above. There are great oceans in between the main sections of land we’re over, and there appear to be cloudbursts all around us. This is a rainy world. A wet world. A humid world.”

He continued on in that manner as the details grew, and Eric described mountains rising toward us. A lake. Highlands, thick with jungle.

I had a wristband with a cyanide pill in it, in case things went bad. I idly wondered if it made sense to take it before we hit the ground. I didn’t want to feel the moment of impact.

“Shep: hold on!” Commander James shouted from back behind us.

We slammed in our restraints as the craft suddenly decelerated. For a moment I was cheered. We’d gotten the rocket back on and would descend on our tail in fire and triumph to the surface of this new world.

But that wasn’t it, we still yawed and swung. The descent was slow, but the thundering roar of the rocket was absent.

“Parachutes!” Tad said. “They got the emergency parachutes open.”

A wall of green flung itself at the portholes. My chair broke loose from its bolts and I spun across the cabin in a sudden cartwheel as the rocket ship struck trees and marsh in a grinding screech.

2.

THE AIR OUTSIDE WAS THICK WITH MOISTURE AND THE SMELLS of exotic, alien plants. Dark purple fronds filled the steep hills all around us, and just a few miles ahead stony mountains jutted up into the air.

We’d been just split seconds away from dashing ourselves against them, I realized.

All five of us gathered outside to walk the hull at Commander James’s insistence. “We need to know how bad the damage is,” he said.

I just wanted to stand outside. We’d been cooped in a metal tube for almost an entire month, eating pills and squeezing food out of tubes. I wanted to just stand in the open copse created when the rocket ship slammed through the palmlike fronds.

But we all nodded and followed orders.

“How bad is it, Shep?” Heston asked, once we’d all walked a circuit around the silvered ship. We’d all paused near the water tanks that had saved our lives. Had the Nazi missile struck anywhere else, we likely would have died right then and there.

“We didn’t just lose water,” Shepard reported. “We vented fuel, and the hull probably won’t survive taking us back up into orbit. The stress of firing the engine might well just cause the whole thing to crumple.”

Heston looked thoughtful. Thinking about all the variables. Working on a plan of action. He looked out over the vegetation around us with a grimace. “Then we’re not here to explore and return. The mission parameters have just changed. We’re here to survive until we can be rescued by another mission. Stewart: where are we with comms?”

I looked up from staring at massive yellow lily pad–like leaves on a nearby plant. “I sent out distress signals the moment we knew the missile was there, sir. And all the way down. But the equipment’s broken. I can look at the spare parts, see what I can cobble up. But I can’t do anything until Shepard gets the power back on.”

Heston turned back to Shepard. “Shep?”

“I’ll get to work on it. A couple hours?” Shep wiped his hands, then jumped back up to the doors and hauled himself into our broken ship.

“In the meantime,” Heston said, “I need you and Eric to take some bottles and hunt for a clean source of water. Eric: get what you need to test the water, make sure it’s safe.”

“Yes, sir!” we said, and I moved to help Eric get a couple of machetes and some large containers.

We’d landed in the high foothills near a natural plateau. The ground was muddy, and at first the closest thing we found to water was several pools of swampy muck as we chopped through the jungle.

Eric was quiet, no doubt as a result of being a bit shook-up. But I was also out of sorts myself. I was happy to be by his side, though. A bookish type, Eric was the crew member I’d always liked the most. Of all the crew, he had yet to make a random comment about Italians, Jews, Poles, Blacks, or Hispanics that left me secretly angry but outwardly carefully neutral.

I could relax a little near him, not expecting some sudden verbal explosion that would wing me.

The heat and humidity caused me to sweat heavily as we hacked our way onward, and I pulled my long-sleeved shirt off to wrap it around my waist.

“I’d keep that on,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

Eric pointed the machete at fist-sized black marks on the feathered leaves of nearby fronds. “They’re not exactly like mosquitoes, but they’re giant bugs. Probably because of the denser air, I imagine.”

I pulled my shirt back on. “Will a shirt stop a supermosquito?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Don’t know, but maybe it’ll help.” There were large gnats, clouds of which burst out from the ground like jittery dark thunderclouds when we disturbed them.

Eric perked up after a while and began examining the vegetation, trying to pin down what it might be analogous to back on Earth. “Very Mesozoic,” he kept saying. And all I knew about that was that it had something to do with dinosaurs.

We stopped at the edge of two fetid pools of water while Eric examined them. “Stagnant,” he pronounced, and we kept on.

The ground grew muddier, but Eric found a ridge of rock to scramble on that poked over the worst of it, and we began to skirt over the jungle. Occasionally he stopped to draw landmarks on a pad of paper. “There’s no sun, or stars, or compass we can use here,” he said. “We have to be careful not to get lost.”

He also stopped twice to make quick sketches of brightly colored, long-tailed, birdlike creatures that burst out of the treetops and glided through the air.

Eventually we took a break near another flat plain by more swamp. By now, Eric was grinning, our predicament taking a backseat to his scientific wonderment at the flora and fauna of an alien world. “There are tracks here. There seem to be large animals. And we should be able to follow them to a source of water,” he said.

I sat with my back to him, looking toward the tall rocks we’d scaled down from, and took a long sip of water from my canteen.

And it was then that I felt Eric’s back stiffen straight. “Charles,” he hissed.

“Yes?”

“Don’t. Make. A. Move.”

The ground thudded. And again. I looked oh-so-slowly over my shoulder. A ten-foot-tall, six-legged beast with dappled green hide and a fiercely reptilian face hissed at us.

But that wasn’t what made my stomach clench. A thin-limbed man, with skin so pale it looked almost transparent, stood up on leather stirrups and pointed what was unmistakably a long-barreled weapon at us.

From farther down the trail, three more mounted Venusians plodded along, their long rifles aimed right at us.

“They’re bipedal,” Eric breathed. “And humanoid. How graceful!”

“They have weapons,” I murmured.

“This must be some form of parallel evolution. This is the sister planet, and these are sister peoples,” Eric said to me out of the corner of his mouth. “Or maybe we all came from the same organisms …”

He didn’t get to finish his thinking, because the four Venusians charged us. The heavy-footed beasts thundered as their long necks slinked forward with more eager hisses.

I grabbed Eric’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet and we ran, but within seconds the thud of saurian beasts filled our world and nets with heavy weights slapped into our backs.

We fell to the ground, entangled and struggling to get our machetes out to chop at the netting. I managed first, sawing through and scrambling up. Eric followed.

He raised his machete, and a bright flash of light cracked out from one of the rifles. Eric screamed and dropped his blade, then raised his hands warily. “You’d better drop yours too,” he said.

I let it fall to the ground.

The Venusians regarded us with large eyes and dark pupils, then dropped to the ground with loops of rope.

Within a minute, we were tied behind the beasts and being pulled along down the trail, through the jungle.

“I don’t understand,” Eric said, in shock. “We are visitors from another world. They must have seen the rocket ship. We must look alien to them. This is a First Contact situation, what are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and gasped as the rope yanked at me.

They pulled us into what looked like a village, with huts made out of long poles and woven with fronds. Wary Venusians sat around cooking pots. They began to shout and point at us with large smiles, while the Venusians who captured us responded with similar whoops.

“We. Come. In. Peace,” Eric declared, but was rewarded with a strike to the head for his efforts. I grabbed him as he staggered and helped him stand as we were shoved into a set of cages at the center of the village.

I should have spent the next couple of hours paying attention and learning what I could about the Venusians, but instead I did my best to make Eric comfortable and keep him from falling asleep.

A blow to the head was never a good thing.

As a result, I almost didn’t notice another party of Venusians returning in triumph with the rest of our crew. Cmdr. Heston James, shoved forward by gunpoint, Shepard by his side, both of them holding Tad up by an arm and looking exhausted, bruised, and shocked.

Inside the cage with us, Heston took a look at Eric briefly. “He should be okay,” he said in a grim voice. “But Tad’s in worse shape. He fought back. All the way. They shot him.”

There was a burned hole in Tad’s stomach. It was blackened with cauterization, but we all had enough medical training for the trip to know that it was fatal.

“Charles, you’re the languages and communications expert, any read on these Venusians?” Heston asked.

I shook my head. I was the languages guy, which meant that I’d studied seven or so before the war while I was in college. The half-completed linguistics degree had helped edge me into the communications spot on the crew. “It’s another planet. Another species. And I’ve been watching after Eric.”

“Fucking savages,” Heston spit. “Animal-riding, hut-living savages.”

I said nothing.

Tad died a few hours later, gurgling out his last breath with a whimper of pain. Eventually, we all tried to get some sleep as the ambient, cloud-filtered sunlight faded away.

We woke early the next morning to Shepard’s shouting at several tiny Venusians who were poking him with a sharp stick.

Eric was looking around, dazed and awake, thank goodness. His only comment on the situation was a bemused observation. “I think the superpale skin they have is an adaption,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Not much sunlight gets to the surface of Venus. If you look at people on Earth, it’s the same. The farther north, the less sun, the paler they get.”

3.

WE WERE TAKEN DOWN OFF THE PLATEAU THE NEXT MORNING on a two-day-long, jolting cart ride to a fortress that looked like a giant sea urchin with black, spiked rock spurs radiating in all directions.

Under one of the spurs, the Venusians argued for fifteen minutes with another set of Venusians wearing fancy red silks.

Then more Venusians came out with a crate full of rifles.

“I think we just got traded for rifles,” Shepard said. “Jesus Christ.”

The hill Venusians turned and left us standing in front of the spiked fortress, heading back to their swampy home.

“They won’t know we came from the sky,” Eric said, his voice quavering slightly.

“Then we learn the local lingo,” Commander James said quietly. “However long it takes us. And we tell them. They can see, with their own eyes, that we look different.”

“For all they know,” I said, speaking for the first time that morning, “we’re strange Venusians from some unknown location on their planet.”

“Stow that talk,” Heston ordered.

—–—

The next week of travel blurred. More carts. Baggage trains. Often we were forced to walk along them, our hands bound, pale Venusians shouting at us. Shepard and Eric had been keeping shifts tracking our turns and directions, trying to keep an internal map of how to get back to our ship.

The humid air stopped feeling so strange in the second week of walking. The feathery fronds of the vegetation began to stop looking so strange. Though every time something rustled from deep inside the vegetation, I still felt nervous.

We arrived at a coast in the second week. A great walled city sat half in the emerald forest and half projected out into the gray ocean. Docks stuck out like fingers from a hand, and a crude seawall protected it all from the ocean swells.

Rock houses leaned this way and that inside the walls. Warehouses painted in pastel shades leaked strange scents none of us could recognize. Was that cinnamon? With a bacony sort of vanilla?

We’d been fed Venusian food. A tasteless, pasty stew that caused me to spend the first night in agony with stomach cramps but that I’d adapted to in the days of walking. But smelling the scents, I realized we’d been given their equivalent of gruel.

We followed our captors down streets no more than four or five people wide, then into a central market. It was filled with Venusians selling flanks of meat, what looked like misshapen vegetables in unappealing colors, and the spices that we’d smelled passing the warehouses.

A short Venusian with scars advanced on us with a knife. We recoiled, but he used it quickly to cut our clothes away.

“Damn it!” Heston screamed, uselessly, as he stood in the air naked as the day he was born, his naturally ramrod straight back suddenly curved as he tried to cover himself.

Venusians threw buckets of water on us to clean the road dirt away and scrubbed us clean.

And we were marched over to a stone dais.

My stomach clenched as I stood there and watched Venusians cluster around to stare at us.

“We’re visitors!” Shepard shouted at them. “Visitors from another world! Don’t you understand? You should be giving us a parade!”

“Shep,” Eric said quietly, and looked at me. “I think Charles is right. They’ve never seen outside the clouds. They might not know about other planets, stars. They probably think we’re just strange-looking Venusians.”

“But we came in a rocket ship!” Shepard protested.

“Is that anything like an airship?” Eric asked, and pointed over our heads.

We looked up. A massive lighter-than-air machine glided in over the ocean toward the city, slowly beginning to drop out of the air toward a large field.

“The Venusians that captured us might not even know much about such things,” Eric said. “They didn’t know how to make guns, and live in the hills. They sold us for the guns. They might not have even explained to these guys how we showed up.”

He was right. And I was right.

And I knew how right I was when it began. It might have been in an alien tongue, but I knew the patter for what it was.

An auction.

I began to weep silently to myself, suddenly alone and cold in the humid tropical air of Venus, rescue millions of miles away.

Heston snapped at me. “Get ahold of yourself, Charles. We’re going to figure a way out of this.”

“Really?” I stared at him. “It took hundreds of years back home for people to figure a way out. And even then, they still live as secondclass citizens. Even if we do communicate with them, judging by all this, we may end up being little more than scientific curiosities.”

The crew stared at me like I’d grown a second head.

But we didn’t have much time to debate further. We were ripped apart, the auction done. Heston and I were taken to a mansion with a vast cobblestoned courtyard on the edge of the city’s walls. Men in silks and headdresses covered with snakelike patterns of gold led the way, while short, scruffy Venusians poked and prodded us along.

Then they swarmed us, grabbing us by legs and arms and holding us down to the wet stones as we struggled and fought the sudden immobilization.

One of the silk-wearing Venusians kneeled next to us. He held a tiny slug in the grip of some tongs.

“What are you doing?” Heston shouted. “I demand …”

The Venusian shoved the slug into Heston’s nose. For a moment, both slug and man lay still, somewhat stunned.

Then it began wriggling. All the way up into his nose.

Heston screamed.

The Venusian was handed another set of tongs, and turned for me. And I screamed and struggled to no avail.

It slithered into my nose, a slimy wetness moving upward. Mucus dripped down my lip, and my nasal cavity screamed as it was filled with a pushing, tearing sensation. I tasted blood as it dripped down the back of my throat and I gagged.

The Venusians closed great stone doors at the entrance. Some bored guards with rifles patrolled an elevated walkway and looked down at us. But we were left alone on the courtyard’s stones to stare up at the clouds as our foreheads ached.

Dark, gray clouds. Always.

I’d never see a blue sky again, I realized, before I slipped into fever dreams. We vomited bile, bled through our noses, and curled into balls on the stones. Occasionally Venusians would come and yell at us. “Get up! Do you understand us yet?”

It wasn’t until later in the day that I realized something. “Heston! Heston, I think I understand them!”

Heston groaned. “I thought it was you yelling insults at me, but I don’t think you’d call me a Kafftig, whatever that is.”

I could imagine Eric’s telling us that our nasal cavities were the closest entrance in the body to our brains, and this slug would have crawled up there to …

I staggered up. “I can stand,” I said. “Can you understand me?”

“Get up!” a Venusian demanded. “If you can understand me, get up!”

Heston held on to my shoulder. He was excited. “We’re visitors! We’re from another world.” He pointed up at the dark, gray clouds that stretched from horizon to horizon. “We’re from beyond the clouds.”

The Venusians around us laughed. A yipping, barking sound. “There is nowhere else but the surface, and there is nothing beyond the clouds but more clouds and emptiness.”

Heston wouldn’t let it go. He kept arguing. And eventually his shouts led to warnings, then the Venusians clubbed him until he shut up. They forced me to carry him, dazed, across the courtyard and into a small, cramped common house.

It was dark, and damp, and the floor covered in straw. We huddled in the corner away from other Venusians who growled at us as the door was locked shut for the night.

The next morning we were all led out to the landing fields of the city, where the airships slowly eased in over the ocean and came to a rest. Under the eye of two armed Venusians, we unloaded the airship’s wares. Packages of foods, jars filled with oils and spices. The sort of cargo that empires sent to far-flung cities at the periphery.

“I don’t understand,” Heston said. “They have technology. We’re unloading airships. They have laser rifles. Why forced labor? This makes no sense. Maybe they don’t have capitalism or democracy here. Maybe we’ll have to bring it to them! Because I tell you what, a few good, red-blooded, American longshoremen would get this ship unloaded faster than any of these other poor creatures.”

I must have snorted because Heston stared at me. “Capitalism and democracy included slavery until late last century, Commander. That was the American way until the Civil War. As far as I can tell, visiting the cotton fields, it is still the natural friend of slavery. You have family in West Virginia digging coal, right? Any of them in debt for life to the company store, being charged company rent for their home and company credit for their groceries? If you can force someone to work for free, isn’t that the most profit ever? If all that matters to you is profit, then it’s a natural endpoint.”

Heston stopped working and glared at me. “Are you a communist?”

I had a retort, but one of the overseers waded in with a club. Heston stood up and shouted back at him but earned several smacks to the head.

By now I was surprised he could even think.

“Work!” we were ordered. “This is not the time for talking. Keep talking and we’ll sear your skin off.”

We got back to lugging stuff off the ship to the waiting carts with their six-legged beasts patiently holding steady in their harnesses.

“If we can just talk to the right people,” Heston whispered, as we walked back. “We need to find a politician or a scientist. We need to talk to their leaders, not workers and overseers. Talk to just the right person in power, it will be okay.”

The commander believed that. He believed that because for him it had always been true. His life had ups and downs, but for true injustices, he’d always been able to find the right person and set things right.

There was order and justice. He truly believed in those things. The world worked a certain way for him.

“If we get this over, and see if we can petition a judge, or someone, we might be able to talk to the right people.”

Heston worked faster and faster, his mind set on the goal of getting the airship unloaded. I struggled to keep up with his newfound energy. The commander had a destination in mind, and now he had set himself to it.

“Commander,” I whispered. “Slow down.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“The other Venusians aren’t working as fast. Think about it. They’re slaves. There’s no reason to kill themselves working harder, they’re not getting paid. The only way for them to make this bearable is to work just fast enough to not be abused, see?”

“Their laziness isn’t my problem,” Heston growled.

That night the entire common house of Venusians beat us with balled fists. Heston gave as good as he could for the first ten minutes, but there were just too many of them.

The next day, we could barely keep up, our bruises and torn muscles were in so much agony we gasped as we worked and said nothing to one another.

“Welcome,” one of the other Venusians had said after he broke my ring finger beneath his blue-veined heel. “To the city of Kish.”

4.

COMMANDER JAMES GOT HIS CHANCE TO TALK TO THE RIGHT Venusian after a long, backbreaking week of labor. Before the sun faded away, the Venusians would let us relax in the purple grasses inside the walls.

I had settled near a reflecting pool, dipping my aching feet in it, when a retinue of colorfully dressed Venusians swept through the courtyard. In the center was the lord of the house, who we had come to learn from overhead chatter was a customs official for the city of Kish.

Heston threw himself into the Venusian’s path. “My lord of the estate!” he shouted as Venusians turned in shock and horror. One of the overseers loitering around the edge of the courtyard raised a rifle, but the lord raised his hand to stop the killing shot.

I realized that Heston had faltered, as he didn’t know the lord’s name. He was only referred to as “the lord.” A pronoun, the pronoun. The only one that mattered within these walls.

Heston stumbled forward. “My lord, I am a rocket man from above the clouds …”

That was as far as he got. The lord shook his head impatiently and gestured, and Commander James was hauled away. He might have been stronger than the slender Venusians, but there were more of them.

“Was he one of the new exotics?” the lord asked, and looked over at where I still sat.

“Yes, my lord,” one of the overseers said, rushing to bow. “They work hard.”

“Good. Worth the metal price. But do cut off their tongues if they ever dare babble at me again.”

And in a flourish of silks and nutmeglike perfume, the retinue left for the sound of music and laughter somewhere deep in Kish.

“He is lucky they didn’t take his tongue out as a first punishment,” said a Venusian nearby. She sported knife scars up and down her arms, and I could tell she came from the northern hills by her cadence and the punctures in the webs of her hands, where she’d once worn gold rings.

“He’s stubborn,” I told her. “I bet he will lose it before we are done here.”

I tended to a dazed Heston after his beating, trying to get him to drink water. I was trying to get him oriented because he was floundering. “You know free economies are rare, Commander. Even on Earth. It’s not surprising, really. If aliens were to land on Earth and look vaguely like us, it might not have been good for them either, being different. Imagine if aliens had landed in the South, before the Civil War that we had to fight so bloodily to get rid of this stain …”

Through bruised lips and swollen eyes, Commander James said, firmly, “The War of Northern Aggression was fought over states’ rights.”

And with a grunt of pain, he picked up his blanket, his dog tags that he’d been allowed to keep, and dragged himself over to the other side of the common house.

—–—

I became an alien on another world, with the only other person I knew refusing to speak to me. I was annoyed at first, working out arguments in my head that I would have with the commander when we next spoke. But the work ate into me.

The moment the sun leaked through the clouds, Venusians beat us awake to head out to the fields where the large, silvered airships came to rest. And all day long we’d unload what the city of Kish needed to consume, and a lot of what its lords desired to spend their vast wealth on.

“Where do these goods come from?” I asked the Venusian with the scarred arms.

The first time I asked, she ignored me. But as we stood and waited for another airship to arrive and drank from waterskins, she spoke to me.

“Other cities, larger cities,” she said, pointing off toward the ocean. “The lords of Kish cannot do without the spices and foods from their mother cities. And Kish is not big enough to grow its own.”

“And Kish trades rifles and machines for minerals, ores, and work,” I said.

“Yes.”

The next airship we loaded with scared Venusian hill-tribe folk, possibly even some of the same ones who’d first captured us, now captured by some other group with laser rifles. We shoved and beat them aboard and tried not to meet their pleading eyes.

One late night, she came to my blanket.

“My name is Maet of Tannish,” she told me.

“I’m Charles Stewart,” I said.

“Where is Stewart?” she asked.

“Nowhere. It doesn’t matter. I’m Charles of Earth. And Earth is beyond the clouds.”

“There is nothing but void beyond the clouds,” Maet told me with a pitying chuckle. “All that is important lies beneath the veil. There must be a reason we can’t see beyond it, and that is most likely because there is nothing worth seeing.”

I opened my mouth to argue with this, then realized that Maet was my only companion, and I was too tired to argue. I’d thought the weeks of training to be a spaceman intense.

I had no idea.

I’d had energy and verve my first few days. But as weeks became months, my back felt like it’d been set on fire by the constant bending. My fire to understand and study the world around me dampened every day. There were no weekends. No labor laws to limit being rushed out in the middle of the night to grab the ropes of an incoming airship, then unload it once it was tethered. No time to recoup. Just a slow, steady erosion.

Maet just lay next to me, and that was enough that first night, to feel someone breathing next to me.

I struggled to glean information about where Kish lay from her and what was out beyond its borders. The free lands of wild peoples. Hill tribes. What trails led where? I wanted to make a map of the world in my head before I made any decisions. I needed to find out how best to make my way in this world, and to understand its rules, no matter how horrific.

And I’d always had to play the game of their rules and my hidden face. I remembered my grandfather telling me once, “Never show anyone what you’re really thinking, because then they might know what you’re going to do.” Even Maet, as we continued to huddle in our corner of the common house, didn’t know what I thought about.

As Maet and I grew together, I saw Heston had started to talk to other Venusians. In the courtyard behind a tree. Near the corner of the common house.

I wasn’t surprised when he crawled over to my blanket as I lay sweating in the tropical heat and humidity while Maet was off talking to someone else.

“Soldier, we may have our differences,” he hissed to me, “but now it’s going to be time to fight together.”

“You’re planning a revolt,” I said, looking over at his crouched form. It was a shadow against a shadow in the city light that came in through the barred windows at the top of the walls.

I couldn’t see surprise on his silhouetted face, but I could hear it in his voice. “Yes. There are others who want their freedom. I’ve been talking to them. Will you join us?”

Ever since I saw him whispering to others, I’d thought about it. And about what I would say. “You ever read much about slave history?” I asked. “Probably not, it’s not a field many people study. But let me tell you something: all of the slave revolts except the one on Haiti were put down. And we’re not on an island that we could defend. Even in South America, where they had great numbers, they still remained under colonial rule for many long ages.”

“None of them had a US Marine in charge,” Heston hissed.

“You think none of them had any war experience?” I asked calmly. He didn’t know their names, or positions, because they’d been wiped out. But many early slaves had been captured in war. My own family held at least two tribal leaders, according to legend. One of them had committed suicide after three years of being forced to work a sugar plantation.

“They need the right kind of leader,” Heston said.

I put a hand out to him. “I wish you luck.”

Heston hissed. No doubt disgusted with me and thinking me a coward, he ignored my hand and left as he saw Maet’s silhouette coming toward us.

Was I a coward? I could hardly sleep that night, bile in the back of my mouth.

In the early gray light of dawn, I woke to Heston’s screams. I remembered the sound of a cat that had been caught by a hunting dog one of my neighbors had penned up when I was a kid, and it was something like that. A high-pitched mewling that didn’t stop, it snapped me out of my dreams about blue skies and no clouds.

Heston was in the courtyard, his hands and feet bound to a pole set into a notched hole in one of the flagstones.

Venusians didn’t use whips. They hung pink-and-snow-feathered leeches from Heston’s chest and back. As I got close I could hear a loud sucking crunch, and Heston screamed again.

When the creature was finished, one of the overseers pulled it away, leaving a deep and ragged hole that streamed blood and black ichor. It smelled of licorice and rot.

Venusians streamed past, darting sidelong glances as I moved to stand in front of Heston. He looked up at me through a haze of pain. “Charles …”

“Who betrayed you?” I asked sadly.

Heston coughed. “Thought it was you, at first. But it was a Venusian. Telkket. From one of the southern marshes. He stood here and announced to everyone what I’d done. Why? Why would someone do that?”

“The same reason it’s always been done,” I said, fiddling with my bracelet. “Even if your uprising had succeeded, most of our fellow workers in the common house stood a chance of dying from the repercussions. A slaver society reacts strongly to uprisings, they’d know that. By ratting you out, he’s guaranteed a small improvement in his life. Most people go for the bird in the hand.”

Heston began to cry. “They’re going to drag this out. They’re going to kill me.”

“Or not,” I said. “A living, crippled and broken slave is a good example to have as well.”

“Oh God.” That last was a faint whimper.

I thought for a long second, then continued. “You probably suspected this, given the things I’ve said. But some of my ancestors were slaves. My great-grandfather, he fought. Like you. Was whipped. Hobbled. Scarred by brands. But one day, after fighting so long, he up and cut his own throat rather than continue living under the whip. Not something I figured you’d appreciate before this morning, but something I’ve been thinking on ever since we were captured.”

Heston looked up at me with lost eyes.

I cracked my wristband and removed the cyanide pill inside. “I know you didn’t have time to use yours,” I said. “Maybe they won’t kill you. Maybe they’ll keep hurting you. I don’t know. But I want to give you this. Just in case.”

I placed the pill on his tongue, like a priest giving someone a Communion wafer.

“Thank you,” he hissed.

One of the overseers struck me, yelling at me to move on. I left as they were putting the leeches back on. This time they ate at his ankles, and Heston sagged at the pole as his feet failed.

By sunset he was dead, mouth foaming from the cyanide pill.

5.

“I’M PREGNANT,” MAET TOLD ME ONE MORNING AS WE LINED UP for the fields.

The look on my face unnerved her. She squeezed my hand. “Don’t be so sad, Charles of Earth.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Didn’t know what?” Maet asked.

“That we could even have a child.” She was Venusian. But we all were humanoid, as Eric had noted in our first days trapped together. He had talked about common evolution, or panspermia. Or even more fanciful reasons why the human form existed here.

And then the real horror of it all struck me. “What life will my child grow into?” I asked. I thought about myself at four, free and playing in the grass, ignoring my mother’s call to come inside. I tried to imagine bringing my own child along to the fields to unload the ships. Seeing my child whipped and broken.

“There are many here who are generations old,” Maet said. “We will adapt. All adapt.” But there was a note of sadness and resignation in her voice.

I could hardly see the ground in front of me for days.

My world revolved around the stone street out to the field where the airships landed. I could count the stones on the walk to and from the common house with my eyes closed, half-asleep in the early morning shamble out, and the tired shuffle back to what I’d come to regard as home.

My dreams, when I was rested enough to dream now, turned from trying to remember what blue skies looked like to dreaming of flying. It took me a long while to understand what my subconscious mind had decided, as I had slipped into a dark place while thinking about bringing a child into this world.

But one day, watching the silvered airship approach and drop its single bowline, I knew how I would leave: I wouldn’t run, I would fly.

I’d been walking in and out of the cabins of these ships for so long. I knew the layout, and although I couldn’t read Venusian, I had some sense of the controls. I had been a pilot in the war, after all.

The Venusian airship designs were better than the old Nazi ones we’d seen in newsreels. The Venusians compressed the helium inside into tanks, letting the airships glide down onto the ground and unload cargo without shooting up into the air. The bowline was a formality, probably a holdover from when they’d been more like the airships on Earth and always lighter than air.

It took just a few minutes to pump the helium back into the airship’s envelope. That, I thought, would be the trickiest segment of my plan.

But I wouldn’t be able to fly it alone.

The longest stretch of work came as I worked to convince the overseers to bring Shepard and Eric over to our estate, promising them that the three of us would work harder despite the nightly beatings we would surely suffer for rising above the pack.

That took working extra hard. To get noticed by the overseers so I could sell them on the idea. And that meant barely sleeping in a corner with a small piece of metal I’d rubbed into a sharp blade against a stone edge to protect Maet, my unborn child, and myself.

When the lord approved the purchase, and the overseers shoved a very thin Eric into the common room, I barely recognized him. Emaciated, his hair unkempt, he collapsed by my blanket and slept.

“It was hellish,” Shepard told me as I kept watch with my blade. “They were working us to death building a seawall for real ships. Knee deep in the water, moving rocks however we could. Bit by bit. I kept telling them I was an engineer. We could do better with machines, and they beat me every time. I learned to shut up pretty quick.”

“It is better here,” I told him. And Shepard began to weep silently and thank me for getting them moved. They were not surprised by Maet, or to find that she was pregnant. Eric shrugged, and wasn’t even fascinated by the fact.

How quickly our priorities could change! From heroes of a nation to weeping about being moved to a less servile state.

I told them about Commander James, and Shepard nodded. “They took our bracelets away and sold them as trinkets to the children. Sometimes I would lie awake hoping one of them ate the pill, and other times I hated myself for thinking it.”

“I understand,” I said. “Now get some sleep.”

I watched over them that first night in the dark like a feral mother cat, until Shepard woke up and spelled me. In the days that followed, we set watch each night and got enough sleep to survive.

I waited for Eric to get his strength back before I began whispering my own plan to them. They blanched at first, thinking about Commander James’s fate. “This is not a revolt, this is running off into the bush. There were a lot of people who managed it and built lives for themselves.” I thought of the runaways who had lived in the mountains of Jamaica that my father would tell tall tales about.

“When do we make a run for it?” Shepard asked.

“When we’re done unloading, and everyone is going back. We cut the moorings and leap aboard. We’ll only ever have one chance. And we’ll have to make sure there aren’t armed Venusians aboard. I won’t know the best moment to do this ahead of time, but if I call for you, do not hesitate.”

The Venusians at my estate let us keep possessions, though the overseers ransacked through them on random occasions. I’d been storing cured meats that we’d been given and a kind of hard bread. A few water sacks hid the stuff that could get us in trouble.

Food, water, a handmade metal knife, some needles and thread that Maet kept hidden for herself, so she could mend her rough-spun clothes: this was everything we owned.

I hadn’t told her what we planned though I began to suspect she knew.

We would head for the northern swamps, near the foothills we’d crashed at. Hike over the nearest pass we could find, and if we made it, off into areas few in Kish cared to visit on the other side.

And, then, maybe, we could figure out what to do. Eric spoke of rescue and scanning the skies. I thought about hacking a small farm out of the wilderness. Shepard knew how to build traps.

Even if we died, we reasoned, we would die once again free.

We just needed the right airship, and a little bit more food to hide in our water sacks, and we could make the run.

The Nazis, though, destroyed our careful plans by arriving one uncharacteristically chilly morning.

The three Nazis had been captured ten days ago, the overseers told us, on an island to the west. They still wore muddied, but tattered German uniforms with Nazi insignia on the shoulders. “You should be excited to have more of your tribe here to work alongside you,” the proud overseer who had arranged the sale explained, and pointed at Eric and Shepard. “Just like these two.”

“But they aren’t like us,” I explained. “They’re from a different country, one we’re at war with.”

“War?” the overseer talking to me found that curious. “Well, there is no war for you here. Just more like you. You’re the same. So you will work the same.”

Left alone, we all eyed one another warily. I realized that Eric and Shepard looked to me for a decision.

I wanted to kill them, for blowing us out of the sky with a missile, but I knew that would only draw attention to us.

The Nazis took the first move, though, introducing themselves nervously. Their commandant, Hans, spoke in lightly accented English. “They captured us when we landed. We thought we were going to be the first Germans to liaise with their civilization, but instead they destroyed our rocket ship and captured us. They refused to believe we came from above the clouds and they put us and all our stuff in cages. They took us around by aircraft to manors and showed us off to royals and important people.”

“Like animals,” another Nazi, Yost, spit. “They put collars on us and chained us.”

“We escaped, once, but they hunted us back down. We killed a few of them,” Hans said, satisfied with himself.

“So they sold us off. We were too much trouble.”

I stood impassively for a while, then held out changes of clothes. Rough-spun fabric, just like the gray clothes we wore. “Well, it won’t be nice like that anymore,” I said. “Now you will be working.”

“That will give us more time to plan,” Hans said.

“To do what?” I asked.

“Gather what tools we can to fight,” the commandant said.

“It’s been tried,” I told him.

“What these creatures need is the right kind of leader. A decorated fighter, a strong strategist. I commanded a panzer squadron in Egypt,” Hans said, his chest sticking out.

“Get dressed,” I told him. “If you take any longer, the overseers will come at us.”

As the Nazis changed clothes, Eric whispered, “Are we going to let them join us?”

I shook my head.

“But they’re humans,” he said. “The only other ones. Surely we have an obligation …”

“We were shot out of the sky by a Nazi missile, Eric,” I whispered back. “What makes you think they won’t try to kill us again? Are you willing to bet everything on that?”

The Nazis would not speak around Maet and viewed her with suspicion. So I kept her close as we worked their first day.

“Will you run with me?” I asked her.

She showed me her scarred arms. “I was free once. They bound me to the pole and scarred my arms to teach me my lesson. But I would be free again, yes.”

I would have hugged her there, but there was work to be done. That night I snuck my blade between Hans’s blankets as he slept. Afterward we tiptoed over to a new place in the common house.

Before the Nazis woke up I found an overseer. The Nazis were enemy combatants, I told myself. Men who would see people like my grandparents eliminated from the world. That was what I had believed when I joined the army.

Yet, on some dark nights, I’d wondered. After all, what were the Nazis but the ultimate end point of European colonialism? Nazis were even white people who had told other white people they weren’t white enough. They were white people who had invaded and colonized other white countries to spread their concept of a master race. Much like those invaded Europeans had once colonized other countries and told the brown people there that they were the master race. Was what the Nazis did to Europe different than what Belgians did to the Congo?

My family had experienced things close to Nazi beliefs on our own home front. Enough that I could shiver and wonder what the point of the fighting was, in darker moments.

But, I reminded myself, Nazism was purified European colonialism. A heady alcohol to the weak beer of American colonialism that was somewhat more survivable; despite the lynchings, there’d been no total ethnic cleansing. So I’d joined the world war and fought, and to my bitterness, seen the war continue on.

Seen the war spread even into outer space as we raced Hitler to other worlds.

No, it would not leave me sleepless to do what I planned, I thought, as I woke the overseer to tell them about the knife.

We woke, hours later, to the sounds of human screams. The Nazis hung bound from three poles. Outside we found Hans slumped forward, dead, my crude knife sticking out of his neck.

The other pair wailed and wept as the colorful leeches sucked and tore into their skin. The overseers had questioned the other Venusians about knife-waving humans, and they pointed to the corner of the common house. One human looked like the other to them, and I’d moved my small group away from the Nazis, who were wearing our old clothes. I’d told Maet to sleep somewhere else.

“We take an airship today if the chance is there,” I said to my fellow remaining humans. “They’ll all be focused on other things right now.”

6.

THE NAZIS SCREWED THINGS UP FOR US. I’D HAD TO USE MY homemade knife, and now I didn’t have anything to cut the airship’s bowline with. So I stood by the tie-down point as casually as I could, a large sack of grain on my shoulders, and loosened the massive knot until it slipped free.

I left the line loose around the great sand-screw sunk ten feet into the ground. From a distance, I hoped it would look like it was still tied.

And then I nonchalantly returned after dropping the grain off.

I could hear Shepard swearing from inside as I loped back into the cabin. Two-thirds of the cargo had been shuffled out by the unloading crew. Six Venusians were inside with us, and one overseer lounged against the wall of the cargo bay, watching the unloading, shouting and smacking us with his club when he deemed us too slow.

Eric leaned over. “Do we wait for everyone to leave with their cargo?”

“Now,” I hissed.

“And the Venusians?”

“Once we’re off the ground they can jump out if they want to stay, or join us if they want freedom,” I said.

We’d wanted a few more days to plan the exact attack on an airship, but we had our chance. Normally several overseers stood inside to watch us. Normally they were more vigilant. But they’d gotten their troublemakers this morning. They were sated from the violence and punishment.

Eric and I attacked the overseer from each side. We wrapped a ripped-open water sack around his head to muffle his cries. We yanked him beneath bags of grain and I crushed his neck with the heel of my foot repeatedly until the soles of my feet struck metal.

Shepard ran into the empty control room and triggered the helium-release valve, reversing the flow from the pressurized tanks.

The hiss was loud, and I glanced down the bay. No armies of overseers swarmed us yet though they were turning, their large, dark eyes opening in realization.

“Fellow people,” I announced to the whole cargo bay. “We are stealing this ship. And if you would like to flee with us, you are welcome. If not, run for the ground!”

Two Venusians ran, jumping out of the bay. It was already three feet off the ground. They rolled on the grass, and for their loyalty were treated with kicks from enraged overseers.

One of them grabbed the lip of the open bay, struggling to get aboard. I kicked at his hands as we continued to rise into the air. He looked up at me, hanging from the edge, such hatred and astonishment in his eyes.

I stomped his fingers until he screamed and let go. He dropped ten feet to the ground, his legs folding awkwardly under him.

The other Venusians turned and ran back for their rifles as we rose higher. The violent lasers cracked and sizzled the air, but I ran forward with Shepard to jam the engines full on. When they droned to life the airship surged away even faster.

Later, I walked back to the open bay and looked back at the stone towers of Kish as they receded in the distance. We passed over the swamps and marshes that surrounded it. Something with a giant, saurapodian neck peeked its head out of the treetops and bellowed at us.

We were a craft of free people.

7.

WHEN MY SON TURNED FIVE, I SAT HIM DOWN. “IT IS TIME TO tell you who you really are, and where you really came from,” I said.

I told him that he was from the tribe of humanity, from the world of Earth.

“Where is that?” he asked.

“Far above the veil of gray.” I pointed at the clouds.

“Will we ever go back?” he asked.

“Most likely not,” I told him. Maybe war had consumed them all. I remembered the stories soldiers told of a new superweapon both sides had supposedly tested out in the deserts of Nevada and North Africa. A bomb that could unleash hell itself and destroy the world many times over. I hadn’t heard of any new Earthmen being captured, or coming through the skies, so maybe the atom bomb had been used.

Or maybe Earth assumed that the surface of Venus was too dangerous, as both missions there had failed to return.

But I told my son of the blue skies and beautiful places I’d seen. About his grandparents and great-grandparents. All the history I knew.

“One day, you, or your child, will stand tall among the Venusians,” I told him. He looked more like his mother than me. And while it complicated our relationship, I knew at least some small part of what he was going through. “But always remember where you came from.”

When he hugged me, his face showed that he didn’t understand.

But I would continue to tell him anyway. Until the stories lodged deep and could be carried onward.

“I know I’m of the tribe of Earth,” he said, and then left to play in the wading pool near the common house. It was hot, and the splashed water cooled him.

He never asked about the scars on my arms, but one day I would have to tell him I’d been branded as a runaway. That the overseers marked me, and would beat me for the slightest provocation.

I never told him his own mother, Maet, cut her throat when they finally caught us. They had followed a homing beacon still working in the wreckage of the airship. They found where we ditched it, and spent months tracking us through the fetid jungle.

I never told him that the mild-mannered scientist, Eric, threw himself in front of laser fire to save my son’s life.

I never told him why his “uncle” Shep limped so horribly.

These things he would discover the truth of sooner or later, and I wanted it to be as late as possible.

On Earth, many slaves living in the very country I had risked my life to protect had in the past tried to run away, like I had. And been dragged all the way back across states, hundreds of miles, to the place they’d run away from. Some across countries.

Because a successful runaway was a precedent. They’d spent resources to hunt us down and bring us back. And in some ways, I’d been no different than Heston. I’d assumed I was smart. Different. Special. That I would be the one to beat the odds.

I knew more now. More of the maps, and paths, and geographies out past Kish. I knew them better than ever before. But to risk the run was to risk my innocent child’s flesh to torture, or worse, for being a runaway if caught.

When he was older, I thought, maybe he would want to try to escape with us. Or maybe not, and I would have to leave him to face life on his own. But I couldn’t leave him now. This is how so many in the past must have gotten trapped, I realized, even as I continued to plan my escape.

I found myself apologizing to my own ancestors. Apologizing for getting caught again, after they worked so hard to free themselves.

There was a poem one of my aunts read to me by a poet named Paul Dunbar. I understood it, finally, though I wish I never had.

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

Every night, in the common house, while I fell asleep, I dreamt of pale, blue skies.