XXVIII
Time was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don’t get tougher; I get softer. Being in love has a lot to do with it, too. The thought of Mary, my beloved Mary, swimming in that artificial womb, neither dead nor alive but preserved like a pickled grasshopper, was too much for me.
I heard the Old Man saying, “Take it easy, son. She’s all right.”
I said, “Go ahead.”
Mary’s overt history was simple, although mystifying. She had been found in the swamps near Kaiserville at the North Pole of Venus—a little girl who could give no account of herself and who knew only her name—Allucquere. Nobody spotted the significance of the name and a child of her (apparent) age could not be associated with the Whitmanites debacle in any case; the 1980 supply ship had not been able to find any survivor of their “New Zion” colony. Its plantations had returned to the swamp; the dwellings were ruptured shells, hidden in rank growth. More than ten years of time and more than two hundred miles of jungle separated the little waif of Kaiserville from the God-struck colonists of New Zion.
At that time, an unaccounted-for Earth child on Venus was little short of incredible. Like finding the cat locked in the icebox, it called for explanation. But there was no one around with the intellectual curiosity to push the matter. Kaiserville still does not have a sweet reputation; in those days it was made up of miners, doxies, company representatives of the Two Planets Corporation—and nothing else. I don’t suppose that shoveling radioactive mud in the swamps leaves much energy for wonder.
Apparently she grew up using poker chips for toys and calling every woman in crib row “mother” or “auntie”. In turn they shortened her name to “Lucky”. The Old Man did not go into detail about who paid her way back to Earth and why, and he avoided my questions. The real question was where she had been from the time New Zion was eaten up by the Venerian jungle and just what had happened to the colony.
The only record of those things was buried in Mary’s mind, locked tight with terror and despair.
Sometime before 1980—about the same time as the flying saucer reports from Russo-Siberia, or a year or so earlier—the titans had discovered the New Zion colony. If you place it one Saturn year earlier than the invasion of Earth, the times fit fairly well. It does not seem likely that the titans were looking for Earthmen on Venus; more probably they were scouting Venus as they had long scouted Earth. Or they may have known just where to look; we know that they kidnapped Earthmen at intervals over the course of two or more centuries; they may have captured someone on Earth whose brain could tell them where to find the New Zion colony. Mary’s dark memories could contain no clue to that.
Mary saw the colony captured, saw her parents turned into zombies who no longer cared for her. Apparently she herself was not possessed, or she may have been possessed and turned loose, the titans finding a weak and ignorant young girl an unsuitable slave. In any case, for what was to her baby mind an endlessly long time, she hung around the slave colony, unwanted, uncared for, but unmolested, scavenging like a mouse for her living. On Venus the slugs were moving in to stay; their principal slaves were Venerians and the New Zion colonists were only incidental. It is sure that Mary saw her parents being placed in suspended animation—for later use in the invasion of Earth? Probable, but not certain.
In due course she herself was grabbed and placed in the tanks. Inside a titan ship? At a titan base on Venus itself? More probably the latter, as when she awoke, she was still on Venus. There are many such gaps. Were the slugs that rode the Venerians identical with the slugs which rode the colonists? Possible—since both Earth and Venus have oxy-carbon economy. The slugs seem to be endlessly protean but they surely have to adapt themselves to the biochemistry of their hosts. Had Venus an oxy-silicon economy like Mars, or a fluorine economy, the same parasite type could not possibly have fed on both.