INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page B

through space and landing on Venus many millions of years ago, sucking the life out of the occupants there, and then leaving it desolate before heading to Earth.
    She picked up her phone. It was only just past ten. Laura would be awake. With one push, eleven digits were dialled.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s Beth.”
    “I know. What do you want?”
    “Just tell me something.”
    “Tell you something…?”
    It was a game they had. The recipient of the question would make something up; often nonsense. Beth didn’t listen to Laura’s words, but she listened to Laura . She wondered if she would detect if Laura had been replaced by an emotionless being. If everything that made Laura human remained, or whether it had been subverted. She listened especially to Laura’s vowels, because she considered they would be the first to go. Not the staccato consonants, but the resonant vowels.
    But Laura’s vowels were just as they should be.
    •••
    Adamson grew older and realised that all planets already existed before he imagined them.
    He was only at the centre of his personal solar system.
    The sense of isolation remained. It carried through his high school years and into adulthood, where, despite on the surface he hit each of the expected social landmarks at the right time, he found at the age of forty-seven that he could look at his wife and three children and not recognise anything of himself in them.
    On nights where the rota dictated that he walk the dog, he took to the hills. Above him, the evening sky fought light pollution revealing its majesty. Unleashing the Labrador he looked upwards, basked in the glow. Unlike the constellations which beckoned with promise he knew many of these were dead stars. Their brilliance long extinguished, with the light itself no greater than a memory of it. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket, having taken it from the packet before he left the house. The slender stem had buckled and needed gentle pressure from his fingers to restore its shape.
    He saw himself as the bent cigarette.
    Venus might be the brightest star in the sky, but he now understood that it wasn’t populated by those silver-suited beings of his youth. Atmospheric pressure ninety-two times that of Earth, a temperature that made it the hottest planet in the solar system and air that was 96% carbon dioxide put paid to that. He lit the tip of his cigarette, sucked the smoke into his lungs. For a moment they felt like the hottest part of his body, his chest tightened, he blew out carbon like a world-builder.
    What he had looked for in the stars and planets wasn’t reflected on the ground. He had barely discovered Earth. So it was that dreams were more than snatched, they were stolen.
    The dog barked. Adamson paid it no attention.
    Then it yelped.
    He drew the cigarette down by half, threw the butt to the ground, and pressed the remainder into the wet soil with the toe of his shoe.
    Then he wandered off into the darkness to find his pet.
    •••
    Gareth found spiders more suitable than flies. Their longer legs triggered the flytrap’s mechanism much quicker than something airborne. Beetles also provided sustenance. He would watch as the trap closed, the interlocking lobes becoming prison bars. From experiments he knew smaller insects could escape through the gap, possibly the plant’s intention. He imagined the cost of capturing small prey exceeded the benefits of digesting it. But for the larger insects, those that struggled, the trap tightened. Digestion took ten days, after which the trap reopened and Gareth removed the husk of chitin and placed it in a box.
    Despite his inexperience he likened the trapping mechanism to a woman. The male an innocent insect, the colourful interior a woman’s promise; the trap was life.
    Gareth never intended to become trapped.
    If Venus were a goddess then she didn’t have man’s interests at heart.
    Still, his tending the plants, his monitoring of their behaviour, his decision how and