The Vanishing Venusians Reseen

by Lee Brackett

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett

A Gender Switch Adventure

I

The breeze was steady enough, but it was not in a hurry. It filled the lug sail just hard enough to push the dirty weed-grown hull through the water, and no harder. Matty Harker lay alongside the tiller and counted the trickles of sweat crawling over her nakedness, and stared with sullen, opaque eyes into the indigo night. Anger, leashed and impotent, rose in her throat like bitter vomit.

The sea—Rory McLaren's Venusian husband called it the Sea of Morning Opals—lay unstirring, black, streaked with phosphorescence. The sky hung low over it, the thick cloud blanket of Venus that had made the Sun a half-remembered legend to the exiles from Earth. Riding lights burned in the blue gloom, strung out in line. Twelve ships, thirty-eight hundred people, going no place, trapped in the interval between birth and death and not knowing what to do about it.

Matty Harker glanced upward at the sail and then at the stern lantern of the ship ahead. Her face, in the dim glow that lights Venus even at night, was a gaunt oblong of shadows and hard bone, seamed and scarred with living, with wanting and not having, with dying and not being dead. She was a lean woman, wiry and not tall, with a snake-like surety of motion.

Somebody came scrambling quietly aft along the deck, avoiding the sleeping bodies crowded everywhere. Harker said, without emotion, 'Hi, Rory.'

Rory McLaren said, 'Hi, Matty.' She sat down. She was young, perhaps half Harker's age. There was still hope in her face, but it was growing tired. She sat for a while without speaking, looking at nothing, and then said, 'Honest to God, Matty, how much longer can we last?'

'What's the matter, kid? Starting to crack?'