The first homo sapiens to roam north from Africa’s Great Rift Valley moved through an endless space—grasslands fading gradually into deserts, themselves giving way to scrub lands and then more grasslands and then forests. They had no way to know that the landscape they looked out upon was diving away from them in every direction, wrapping around an enormous ball lost, itself, in an even more limitless space.
It would take tens of thousands of core-years for their children, traveling by boat and foot and beast of burden to finally reach the ends of the Earth. It would be longer still before they realized that the Earth, in fact, had an end.
Like Earth, Venus is vast. Her surface area is ninety percent that of Old Home Terra, and, unlike Earth, most of her surface is not submerged beneath the water. All traffic on Venus moved by land and by air—and, at least before the revolution that cut the Nast Cluster off from the rest of the planet, by rail lines running through tunnels dug by the Formers a few hundred years after the Cosmic Crusade. These underground express channels crisscrossed beneath her crust in a network covering a collective fifteen million kilometers, following veins of metal and supplying, with their till, all of the building materials that comprised all the cities of Venus.
Like those first hunters in Africa, the children of the Nast Cluster had no way to truly grasp the vastness of the surface of Venus. None of them had ever seen a space bigger than a kilometer or two, and the ones who had seen something even that big had only seen it by venturing out into the lava fields on a rainy day when the mist had washed out enough to allow vision up the limits of the curtain of rain.
Ern, for example, had believed Hoyle when Hoyle had told him it was “a long ride” to Marino. Maybe twenty thousand klicks. But had Ern understood the speed at which the rail car would travel, he might not have gotten on for fear he would die from acceleration shock, or suffocation, or some other byproduct of moving speeds at faster than humans were ever meant to travel.
In the four hours before he regained consciousness, he’d already traveled the equivalent of the distance between Seattle and St. Louis. The long dark was helped along first by the exhaustion brought on by the sudden evaporation of danger, and of his whole body rebelling against allowing him to think about what he’d just seen, and then later by his fellow passengers and their generous administration of narcotics in order to keep him from waking up.
Of course, Ern had no way to know this. He had no way to know anything at all, beyond the confused pandemonium of blood and loss that sent him racing down endless kaleidoscopic corridors haunted by disapproving eyes and silent backs and wails of loneliness.
Waves of vibration shook his body, a low, shimmying thrum beneath a piercing distant whine.
The two sounds came together with sour sweat and the rusty smell of blood, like the images from two eyes sliding together until, suddenly, the world snapped into focus.
And then voices came through the curtain of background noise.
“...kind of decision...” said a woman’s voice.
“Oh, just give it a rest, already!” said a young man who sounded like he was Ern’s age. “Does ‘hung’ mean nothing to you?”
“We’re not hung...”
“Salami doesn’t get hung this long, Stella. Give it up.”
Another voice, a girl’s voice, much closer, said “He’s waking up. Anyone have any more...anything?”
There were a number of noises that sounded like the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
Ern opened his eyes to the sloping metal ceiling of the rail car, and he immediately wished he hadn’t.
“Oh boy...” His vision swam. “Shoulda stayed in the nightmare. Oh oh oh.”
His right arm was screaming at him. He felt like he was trying to balance atop a merry-go-round, and he was still laying down.
He clamped his eyes shut again.
“Why not let Searle decide,” a soft feminine voice said.
“Not in a thousand cores...”
The voices continued back and forth in their nauseating rhythm, and Ern slipped away again into the darkness.
The next time consciousness slid back into Ern’s life, he found himself sitting up. His head was no longer pounding, but it was sore on the left side. He reached up and touched his skull, ever so gently, and the vertigo rushed back in, with the curtain on its heels.
When next his eyes opened, he decided it was better not to inspect his head wound any further. He had other exciting injuries to poke and prod. Someone had stripped his blouse from him, cut it to ribbons, and used it to bind his right forearm, bicep, and shoulder. Even attempting to move sent the curtains wooshing toward him again, and he had to fight to stay awake.
After a few attempts, he learned how to reach across with his left hand and palpate beneath his bandages without losing consciousness. He’d taken a bullet.
No. Three bullets at least.
At least, he assumed they were bullets. He’d never been shot before. But there were holes all along his right arm, and he didn’t remember anyone stabbing him.
Come to think of it, he didn’t remember much of anything after French had told him to run.
A child’s voice behind him said: “He’s awake again.”
Another, this one a woman’s voice, replied: “Can we knock him out again?”
“Eh,” said an old man’s voice, “Not a good idea.”
“What, are you afraid it might kill him?” The woman’s voice sounded bitter.