Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

MY MOTHER HAD firm instructions that, in case of a house-fire, two things required saving: the family photograph album, and the Granville-Hydes. I grew up beneath five original floral papercuts, utterly heedless of their history or their value. It was only in maturity that I came to appreciate, like so many on this and other worlds, my Great-Aunt’s unique art.

Collectors avidly seek original Granville-Hydes on those rare occasions when they turn up at auction. Originals sell for tens of thousands of pounds (this would have amused Ida); two years ago an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum was sold out months in advance. Dozens of anthologies of prints are still in print: the Botanica Veneris , in particular, is in 15 editions in twenty-three languages, some of them non-Terrene.

The last thing the world needs, it would seem, is another Botanica Veneris . Yet the mystery of her final (and only) visit to Venus still intrigues half a century since her disappearance. When the collected diaries, sketch books and field notes came to me after fifty years in the possession of the Dukes of Yoo I realised I had a precious opportunity to tell the true story of my GreatAunt’s expedition – and of a forgotten chapter in my family’s history. The books were in very poor condition, mildewed and blighted in Venus’s humid, hot climate. Large parts were illegible or simply missing. The narrative was frustratingly incomplete. I have resisted the urge to fill in those blank spaces. It would have been easy to dramatise, fictionalise, even sensationalise. Instead I have let Ida Granville-Hyde speak. Hers is a strong, characterful, attractive voice, of a different class, age and sensibility from ours, but it is authentic, and it is a true voice.

The papercuts, of course, speak for themselves.

PLATE 1: V strutio ambulans : the Ducrot’s Peripatetic Wort, known locally as Daytime Walker (Thent) or Wanderflower (Thekh).

Cut paper, ink and card.

SUCH A SHOW!

At lunch Het Oi-Kranh mentioned that a space-crosser – the Quest for the Harvest of the Stars , a Marsman – was due splash down in the lagoon. I said I should like to see that – apparently I slept through it when I arrived on this world. It meant forgoing the sorbet course, but one does not come to the Inner Worlds for sorbet! Het Oi-Kranh put his spider-car at our disposal. Within moments the Princess Latufui and I were swaying in the richly upholstered bubble beneath the six strong mechanical legs. Upwards it carried us, up the vertiginous lanes and winding staircases, over the walls and balcony gardens, along the buttresses and roof-walks and up the ancient iron ladder-ways of Ledekh-Olkoi. The islands of the archipelago are small, their populations vast and the only way for them to build is upwards. Ledekh-Olkoi resembles Mont St Michel vastly enlarged and coarsened. Streets have been bridged and built over into a web of tunnels quite impenetrable to non Ledekhers. The Hets simply clamber over the homes and lives of the inferior classes in their nimble spider-cars.

We came to the belvedere atop the Starostry, the ancient pharos of Ledekh-Olkoi that once guided mariners past the reefs and atolls of the Tol Archipelago. There we clung – my companion the Princess Latufui was queasy – vertigo, she claimed, though it may have been the proximity of lunch – the whole of Ledekh-Olkoi beneath us in myriad levels and layers, like the folded petals of a rose.

“Should we need glasses?” my companion asked.

No need! For at that instant the perpetual layer of grey cloud parted and a bolt of light, like a glowing lance, stabbed down from the sky. I glimpsed a dark object fall though the air, then a titanic gout of water go up like a dozen Niagaras. The sky danced with brief rainbows, my companion wrung her hands in delight – she misses the sun terribly – then the clouds closed again. Rings of waves rippled away from the hull of the space-crosser, which floated like a great whale low in the water, though this world boasts marine fauna even more prodigious than Terrene whales.

My companion clapped her hands and cried aloud in wonder. Indeed, a very fine sight!

Already the tugs were heading out from the protecting arms of Ocean Dock to bring the ship in to berth.

But this was not the finest Ledekh-Olkoi had to offer. The custom in the archipelago is to sleep on divan-balconies, for respite from the foul exudations from the inner layers of the city. I had retired for my afternoon reviver – by my watch, though by Venusian Great Day it was still midmorning and would continue to be so for another two weeks. A movement by the leg of my divan. What’s this? My heart surged. V strutio ambulans : the Ambulatory Wort, blindly, blithely climbing my divan.

Through my glass I observed its motion. The fat succulent leaves hold reserves of water, which fuel the coiling and uncoiling of the three ambulae – surely modified roots – by hydraulic pressure. A simple mechanism, yet human minds see movement and attribute personality and motive. This was not pure hydraulics attracted to light and liquid, this was a plucky little wort on an epic journey of peril and adventure. Over two hours I sketched the plant as it climbed my divan, crossed to the balustrade and continued its journey up the side of Ledekh-Olkoi. I suppose at any time millions such flowers are in constant migration across the archipelago, yet a single Ambulatory Wort was miracle enough for me.

Reviver be damned! I went to my space-trunk and unrolled my scissors from their soft chamois wallet. Snip snap! When a cut demands to be made, my fingers literally itch for the blades!

WHEN HE LEARNT of my intent, Gen Lahl-Khet implored me not to go down to Ledekh Port, but if I insisted, (I insisted: oh I insisted!) at least take a bodyguard, or go armed. I surprised him greatly by asking the name of the best armourer his city could supply. Best Shot at the Clarecourt November shoot, ten years on the trot! Ledbekh-Teltai is the most famous gunsmith in the Archipelago. It is illegal to import weaponry from off-planet – an impost I suspect resulting from the immense popularity of hunting Ishtari janthars. The pistol they have made me is built to my hand and strength: small, as requested; powerful, as required and so worked with spiral-and-circle Archipelagan intaglio that it is a piece of jewellery.

LEDEKH PORT WAS indeed a loathsome bruise of alleys and tunnels, lit by shifts of grey, watery light through high skylights. Such reeks and stenches! Still, no one ever died of a bad smell. An Earth-woman alone in an inappropriate place was a novelty, but from the non-humanoid Venusians I drew little more than a look. In my latter years I have been graced with a physical presence , and a destroying stare. The Thekh, descended from Central Asian nomads abducted en-masse in the 11th century from their bracing steppe, now believe themselves the original humanity and so consider Terrenes beneath them, and they expected no better of a sub-human Earth-woman.

I did turn heads in the bar. I was the only female – humanoid that is. From Carfax’s Bestiary of the Inner Worlds , I understand that among the semiaquatic Krid the male is a small, ineffectual symbiotic parasite lodging in the mantle of the female. The barman, a four-armed Thent, guided me to the snug where I was to meet my contact. The bar overlooked the Ocean Harbour. I watched dock workers scurry over the vast body of the spacecrosser, in and out of hatches that had opened in the skin of the ship. I did not like to see those hatches; they ruined its perfection, the precise, intact curve of its skin.

“Lady Granville-Hyde?”