Venusian Spring
On spring days, when Venus is positioned just so, the clouds in the atmosphere refract sunlight with a tremendous iridescence, painting everything in sight in a glistening rainbow. This was not one of those days. This was winter, and the sky was a rusty brown as the pilgrims streamed in on foot to the glimmering spires and ornate lattices of the Crystal City.
From my family’s apartment in the city, I watched the procession entering the gate like billions of red grains of sand pouring through an hourglass. By the end of the day, every single person on the planet would have gone through that gate. The throng was thick, stretching to the horizon with clumps of men and women broken up by convoys of carts drawn by groxons. Their six hooves pounded the crystalline pavement and their mouths hung open, both long white tongues lolling out as they worked to exhaustion. Occasionally, one of the men nearby would toss a scrap of meat or spray water into their mouths to keep them going without needing to even stop to eat. This was the end of their long journey – the men were inspired by the promise of rest, but the beasts had to be coerced by other means. They were the ones bearing most of the load, after all. The carts were piled high and heavy with liquor, breads, meats and fruits, herbs and spices of every known provenance, pots and pans and plates, and everything else required to turn the usually-uninhabited Crystal City into the bacchanal it was to become the next morning.
I absentmindedly rubbed the sleeves of my robe as I watched, the spun phosphoric silk leaving miniscule flecks of shimmering dust on my fingertips. It was a plain robe, an unadorned ceremonial uniform that everyone wore for the festival, but it was a comfortable one, softer than anything I had worn before. My father sat beside me, smoking dark purple tibblegrass from a helical pipe; its sweet, earthy scent filled the room while the lilac smoke lingered in a thick layer on the floor. He exhaled and turned to face me.
“I was your age too, once. I know how it feels. I didn’t think I was ready for your grandfather to die. I didn’t think I could handle the responsibility. But he sat me down, right here, and had the same conversation with me.” He spoke in the gentle manner he always had, a soothing voice barely higher than a whisper.
“A’o,” he said, repeating the words of his father, “your life belongs to you. I have lived mine, now you must live yours. Do with it as you will. There is nothing you can do that cannot be undone by your son.”
He removed the family diadem from his head and placed it on mine. It was simple, a gold band, dulled from generations of wear, with a single pale-blue stone inset in the center of the forehead. The stone was engraved with one word – A’o. His name, my name, his father’s name, the name that would be given to my son. This name was the link across time, chaining me to the first A’o, the one who lived before recorded history, before the Crystal City was built, before the sky was thick with clouds that doused the world with rainbows on spring days.
“The day will come when you pass this to your son, just as my father passed it to me. But until then, we are with you. You do not need to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. We will help you bear it.”
I looked at my father’s face and saw, for the first time, A’o, the man, unburdened by the circlet that now sat upon my head and all its implications. He was no longer just my father, but the man he was before my birth. His pitch-black eyes shone with a blissful exuberance I had never seen before, and, beneath the wrinkles and pockmarks of age marring his ruby skin, I saw myself. The same sharp nose, the same prominent brow and high cheekbones, the same fanned pattern of creases where the skin stretches across the ridges atop the skull; but beyond that, I saw the same fears, the same desires, the same needs to love and to be loved. He was I, and I was he, and at once I was struck with the significance of what it meant to be a son and what it meant to be a father. I embraced him and said nothing; there was nothing to say, he had had the same realization before.
Across the Crystal City, billions of Venusian sons and billions of Venusian fathers were sharing similar tender moments as family crowns were passed from one generation to the next. The dawn would bring the Festival of Succession: a celebration of the death of the Senescents and the maturation of the Adolescents. Generations were born and died in sync – twenty years after a Birth, the old generation died and the new adults returned home, before another Birth ten years later. This was the Festival of Succession, a planet-wide passing of the mantle.
It was a joyous time on Venus – sorrow was reserved for Birth. For the Senescents, it was a time to be thankful for their lives and the coming freedom from the pains of the world. For the Adolescents, it was a time to celebrate the life ahead of them and the responsibility that adulthood brings. But more importantly, it was a time to fall in love, a time to find a partner with whom they would have a son and daughter of their own. And the Crystal City, with its broad boulevards and glittering squares overflowing with the planet’s entire population, was the perfect place to do so.
Even before the morning sky was painted with the muted sulfur of Venusian dawn, the festival had begun. It began for me with a red blur screaming by my window, followed by another, then another. They died on impact, met by cheers from bystanders as turquoise blood splattered their faces. It was a privilege to choose one’s own death. These were men who chose not to let their bodies shut down, to leave the world on their own terms.
I stepped over their bodies on the way to Garden Square. There was already a sticky trail of turquoise footprints where others had done the same. I joined the procession of pilgrims through the street with my family, my mother and father ahead, my sister at my side. The streets were wide, but even still, the throng moved slowly, trickling towards the square like syrup dripping from a tube. The sea of people clumped here and there, usually where a body was lying on the street or where someone was keeling over. Death was guaranteed for Senescents, our bodies were only designed to last fifty years. Whether they dramatically embraced it or not, none of them would make it through the week.
At the end of the avenue, the crowd began to thin, spilling out into the open space of Garden Square. The square itself was a tremendous sight: canals flowed under the crystal pavement in a spiral pattern, irrigating concentric rings of gardens blooming with opalescent boaflowers, sparkling and vibrating in the daylight, yawberry trees, drooping heavy with their hot pink fruits, poxiebushes, pruned into perfect polyhedra, before flowing into a fountain in the center of the square where water poured from the mouth of a twenty-foot-tall statue of an ancient Venusian warlord.
“Our Patron of Death”, said my father, pointing at the colossus, “The very first A’o. Or so your grandfather said. He might have been putting me on, though, I could never tell with him. He was always a joker.”
The statue was the spitting image of my father. Its immensely detailed carvings had remained, even after tens of thousands of years. He was immortalized with a cold sneer, glowering at the revelry that swarmed his feet. He stood tall, a leg raised with its foot atop a pile of skulls of slain foes. One hand brandished a geryx sword, its blade curved into the traditional S-shape, optimized for severing the head from the neck; the other held up the freshly-hewn head of another enemy, his tortured grimace rendered with the same painstaking detail as the man who killed him. Venus was harsher in his time; he never had the chance to choose his death.
I shuddered involuntarily, feeling the tremendous burden of my lineage for the first time. I bowed my head, in part out of reverence, in part because the circlet on my head suddenly felt much heavier than before. I don’t know how long I stood there transfixed, head bowed, feeling the history of my name echoing through my bones. Seconds melted into generations melted into eternity in an instant. I wondered if my father felt this way when he was my age, if he recognized his own father in the countenance of that ancient crystal titan. I was snapped out of my genealogical stupor by a ring-adorned hand tugging at my forearm.
“A’o, come on! This way!”
My sister, Ti’i, had to shout over the din of the ever-thickening crowd in the square. She wore the signet ring our mother had worn when we were young, set with a brilliant green stone carved with a relief of a fifty-spoked wheel. It too, had been passed down, mother to daughter, since the days when the skulls trampled under the Ur-A’o’s feet contained the living brains of men. She pulled me through the throng, weaving between hastily-constructed-shanty-town stalls and technicolor-fabric tents that had been constructed in the square. We ducked into a raised garden, not yet overrun by revelers sneaking off from the main festivities for a quick tryst and crawled through a long stand of tunnelweed until tumbling out into a pool of cool, crystalline water.
Lying in the pool was my dying mother. She had been infected with goro, the fungal fever, for as long as I could remember, though her body had always fought it off. Now, however, her time had come – her immune system had shut down, and the fungus ripped through her body in a matter of hours. Her cherry-red skin was blistered with oozing black sores where fungal pustules had erupted. Across her body, her veins bulged black with infected blood, weaving a web of disease-discolored decay. The water formed an effervescent halo around her, gently boiling as her body temperature rose to a lethal degree. She smiled when she saw me.
“My children – A’o, Ti’i. Come closer, I am dying.” The words rattled out of her mouth and hung in the air like puffs of rotten air. Her tongue was black and swollen, covered by the fungus. Its tendrils reached down her throat with long furry fingers.
“The day you were born was the most sorrowful of my life. Your father and I bore your pain on our shoulders. We mourned for you, we wept for all the suffering that would fall upon you. And we did so with guilt, knowing that you had not asked to be brought into this world of pain and misery.” She erupted into a coughing fit, spewing black spores with each spasm. “But we created you with hope, the hope that the joys of your lives would outweigh your sorrows. I want you to know this, and to know that I am so sorry for everything I have wrought upon you. This hope still burns in me, even as I leave my guilt behind. I cannot ask anything more of you in this life – it is not my place. I will be forever with you, but your lives are yours, my beloved children. They belong to you now. Do with them as you will.”
The bubbling in the spring slowed to a stop as her body cooled.
By the time we trudged back through the dense stand of spiked keroko trees and out of the garden, the shanty town growing at the feet of the statue had nearly tripled in size as the square swelled with new pilgrims. Enticed by the wafting aromatic assault produced by thousands of different dishes being cooked simultaneously, my sister and I headed for the town. Or, tried to, rather - the mass of people in the square had other plans. It wasn’t long before we were separated again, swept up in the crowd and carried away by opposing currents.
I was unmoored, adrift in an ocean of red flesh, my motion subject to the whims of the revelers around me. Struggling against the tide got me a stray elbow to the jaw and no closer to where I was trying to go, so I relented. I ceased moving of my own volition, only following the momentum of the swaying masses around me, occasionally losing contact with the solid ground altogether.
The throng had a destination in mind for me, evidently, and I was not long on the sea of people before being dumped into a carefully-protected-semicircular gap in the crowd at the foot of a raised garden, where just one of the thirty-thousand bands across the Crystal City had just finished setting up and was now preparing to explode into a frenzy of frequencies and a riot of rhythms for the patiently-waiting pilgrims at their feet. The semicircle started to fill in, now – all Adolescents, newly adorned with our family heirlooms. This was clearly a mating ritual, set up for us by the Senescents at the edge of the clearing, but we were still novices with our bodies, just days into sexual maturity. None of us knew how to proceed. We milled about, looking at each other awkwardly, smiling and exchanging a polite “hello” or an “isn’t this exciting?” whenever eye contact was made. It was an uncomfortable pubescent eternity before the band started playing.
The music was intoxicating, expanding in our ears and filling our bodies. The Venusian brain, as it were, is highly sensitive to aural input, and certain tones can trigger physiological changes – like an increased sex drive – or compel certain behaviors – like excessive movement. Festival music was designed for this purpose.
The geometric melodies of the eleven-stringed-short-necked bawo wailed sharp and clear through the air with strings that cut into the fingers of the men playing them while the atonal and amorphous zezerea was prodded with electricity to make it pound and crack and stutter out bowlegged rhythms to five-step waltzes while the khali-khali horn screamed out with honey-sticky voices that oozed into gaps in the meter kindly left unoccupied by the bawo and the zezerea and the paxadrum and the vyooret and all sizes of lebixes and every other variety of instrument that had ever been played anywhere on Venus.
The music commanded us, grabbed hold of us, and began puppeteering those of us in the clearing with enough elbow room to move freely. Spastic tremors melted into graceful pirouettes which burst into jagged hops and skips. One of the players of the U-shaped-two-manned khali-khali blew out his last breath, playing a sour note and collapsing where he stood. A man from the crowd climbed up to the stage and took his place, playing only for a few seconds before the man on the other side of the horn blew out his last breath. We danced with partners and trios and groups, moshing into one another in impromptu choreographic cubism, our social barriers now broken down by the pheromones and the electric currents coursing through our veins. The zezereaist died by electrocution; he took a bow after a particularly intense number and prodded himself in the heart while doing so. We, the Adolescents in the semicircle, were hooting and laughing, embracing one another with each death and joyously thrashing our bodies about. A bawo player took one step too far and toppled off the stage, breaking his neck in the process. It was time for us to make love.
Unconsciously, we began the ancient mating traditions that were finely engraved into our skulls and hard-wired onto our neurons. I lost control of my body. My musculature was moving entirely by genetic instinct, while I, the conscious part of me, stood by and watched, tunnel visioned. My arms stretched themselves straight out on either side, my fingers splayed and my palms upright. My throat contracted, and, in the lowest possible vibrato my body was capable of, my vocal cords buzzed with a single note, held until I was gasping for breath. Arms still outstretched, my legs took three steps forward, then two steps back, then hopped twice – the first being so small that it was barely perceptible as anything other than a bend of the knees, the second being so large that I could have leapt onto the raised stage where the band had temporarily ceased playing. In my peripheral vision, I could see the other men performing the same stereotyped actions, succumbing to their basal instincts as I had. My hands came together in a single clap above my head, where they remained as I felt my spine bend until my fingertips, followed by the ridges on top of my skull, made contact with the ground, at which point, through a previously untapped reservoir of core strength, my body vertically inverted itself one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Walking on my hands now, I repeated the same three-steps-forward-two-steps-back-small-hop-large-hop before my spine bent itself backward and I found myself upright again.
A woman, driven by a similar sexual instinct, approached me. My arm was extended to her, and she grabbed my left forearm with her right hand. I felt nothing. She scowled, and walked away, on to the next-most-impressive man in the circle. Another woman followed suit, and I still felt nothing. She too, proceeded to her second-choice mate. Five more times this happened, each woman touching me in the same place, each slinking off, disappointed, before I found my mate. When she touched me, it felt like a swarm of myxlo had descended onto my body and smothered me in their tiny, fuzz-covered wings. This was the way our bodies told us that our pheromones were compatible, that our children would be healthy. We were infatuated in an instant.
Satisfied with the courtship ritual, my body ceded control back to me, its conscious inhabitant.
“A’o”, I said, smiling at her. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Za’e”, she replied, meeting my gaze with her dreamy so-deep-purple-they-were-almost-black eyes. “Likewise, A’o.”
We exchanged the typical pleasantries as the band picked back up. We embraced, dancing as one, less out of affection than a desire to hear one another over the bellowing music. Her mother was a scholar (as was mine), and her father was a weaver (mine was a judge). She hailed from the southern hemisphere (I, from the north), and she had trained under a master cartographer (I had followed my mother’s footsteps and was to become a historian). She preferred mornings (nights for me) and her favorite season was the spring (on that, we were in agreement). Neither of us had travelled much before the festival (ironic for a cartographer, I quipped; she was unamused) and neither of us had a strong affinity for animals (their stench could be overwhelming).
I was glad that we had chosen one another. I quite liked her, even beyond the biological compatibility that had ordained us as a mating pair. I enjoyed her company, and it seemed as though she enjoyed mine, too.
As we spoke, the band entirely changed its composition six more times. Bodies were shoved off the raised garden-stage, piling up in our semicircular dancing-space. As the space filled in from the flat edge, the Senescents holding back the crowd around the clearing started to drop dead themselves, each death compressing the gap a little more. Squeezed on both ends, it was only a matter of time before the throng was upon us, and I did not want to be separated from Za’e the same way I was from Ti’i.
“Don’t worry, A’o, I‘ll teach you to move freely,” Za’e laughed as I expressed my concerns. “Just hold my hand. Follow my lead.”
We slipped into the crowd, clinging tight to one another.
“Now watch!”
Za’e relaxed her body entirely, allowing herself to flow lithely among the barrage of arms and legs and bodies. She became a liquid, unimpeded by the sea of flesh around her, cutting through it like a knife through butter.
“Shift your weight the way you want to go. Don’t force it. You have to become part of the chaos. Think about the ocean: a drop of water in the ocean flows freer than a drop of oil. Relax your body. Good, just like that. Now lean forward, just slightly. We’re part of the whole, we can’t control what goes on around us. Embrace it. Good, A’o, good!”
We swam through the crowd in that way, allowing its variety of currents and eddies to carry us when they so chose. We climbed ashore in the ever-growing shanty town, climbing up to the rooftops of the hastily constructed plank-huts. It was more spacious here, certainly still bustling with people, but we had the freedom to move unimpeded. Eye-level now with my ancestor’s enormous crystal abdomen, I gazed down at the crowds both inside and outside of the town. As far as I could see from my (admittedly-poor) vantage point, there were bodies. Some living, some dead, all their own shade of scarlet or vermillion or cinnabar. Across the Garden Square, I saw dozens of semicircular clearings and heaping red mounds. The clearings: sites of mating rituals like the one I had just experienced; music mingled into a blurry, intangible murmur as it wafted from every direction into my ears. The mounds: great heaps of bodies where Senescents chose to die together, their turquoise blood intermingling and spilling into the canals. The blood-tainted water spilled out of the mouth of A’o the First, pouring out of the fountain in a translucent cyan cascade. This was the Festival of Succession: a celebration of dyads, each inseparably dissolving into the other. Blood and water. Adolescence and Senescence. Life and Death.
“A’o! Hey!” Ti’i snapped me out of my stupor once more, this time with an embrace. She had spotted me from below and climbed up to the rooftop.
“It’s good to see you, brother. I was worried I had lost you” She turned to Za’e, to whom I had been protectively clinging, and extended both hands in a gesture of formal greeting. “Ti’i, daughter of A’o.”
Za’e smiled and took her hands. “Za’e, daughter of U’i. I’m glad to meet you.”
Introductive formalities concluded, Ti’i, promising open seats at a feast table at a garden nearby, whisked us away. We clambered down from the shanty town rooftops and swam through the bog of bodies, choking through clouds of tibblegrass smoke where toking Senescents sat in circles and coughed until their ribs cracked and their eyeballs burst and bits of lung shook loose and spewed out of their mouths. We climbed atop mounds of corpses, our feet crunching brittle bones and squelching putrescent flesh where bodies were already rapidly decaying. We wove between Adolescent orgies and Senescent melees, event horizons of life and death where flesh pounded flesh until one body gave out in a heaving sigh of relief and the other moved on to the next body waiting for them. A Senescent handed me a knife and told me to kill him. I plunged it into his heart. He collapsed with a grin and without a sound.
Ti’i led us back to the garden where our mother died. I washed the old man’s blood from my face in a canal flowing into the pool where her body lay, now unrecognizable as anything beyond a mat of fluid-seeping varicose black fur.
“Just through here,” my sister said, pushing through the reflective gold fronds of a short-stumped aegre palm.
We emerged into an Edenic clearing – the chaos and clamor in the Garden Square (and the rest of the Crystal City) had no place here. The constant din of millions of murmurs could not penetrate the dense grove of glittering-gold aegre palms tangled up with lush green kovel vines flowering in gradient from white to pink to red to purple to blue to white again. The ground was blanketed in soft moss and flower petals; my toes were happy after spending so long on the hard crystal pavement of the square. A statue, larger than life but still feeble looking compared to the enormity of the fountain of my ancestor, stood in the center of the clearing. Under his gaze sat, from the looks of it, roughly one-hundred Venusians around a sparkling crystal table that was close to buckling under the weight of the bountiful feast it supported.
“A’o, Za’e – this is my mate. Welcome to his table.” Ti’i placed her hand on the shoulder of a man sitting at the head of the table. He rose to his feet and extended his arms to me in the gesture of formal greeting.
“O’o”, he said, “son of Nu’a.”
I took his hands. “A’o, son of Ti’i. Thank you for your hospitality.”
O’o laughed an infectious, laid-back kind of laugh. “No, A’o. I can’t take credit for this, man! This is the Festival of Succession, my brother, we are all one here! What is mine is yours is ours. Now, sit down, man. You and your partner. You are more than welcome here, help yourself!” As he spoke, he gesticulated wildly with his hands, weaving his fingers together every time he mentioned something about unity.
The statue, O’o explained between bites of a succulent, kidney-shaped balafruit that squelched out jets of white foam when he bit into it, was of his ancestor, the gardener who planted many of the plants in the Garden Square. The table was not “his” – everything in the Crystal City was shared property – but it was well hidden, and it was only through his lineage that he knew the table’s location. Even still, strangers found their way to the secluded feast, and crimson thighs and buttocks covered just about every inch of the polished-onyx benches. It was through his lineage, too, that O’o took on the role of host. Every feast, communal or not, needed a host, and the responsibility for this one had fallen upon the various iterations of O’o since the very first Festival.
Ti’i, being the mate of the table’s host, took her place at the table’s head beside O’o’s high-backed chair, ornately carved with floral motifs, in an identical seat of similarly polished onyx. Za’e and I, following the customary rules for feast tables, sat across from one another, taking the seats nearest to the head of the table. As new guests arrived, they would supersede us, pushing us one place down towards the foot of the table, at which point we would be ejected from the table and have the option to leave or return to the head. This, as recounted to us by O’o, who had himself learned it from his father, who had learned it from his father, et cetera back to the days when my ancestor was decapitating enemies and his ancestor was planting seeds, served to ensure the hosts could mingle with each guest equally and, more importantly, to facilitate the portioning of certain dishes dispersed across the table.
And the dishes of course, were plentiful, and as varied in their color and form as their gastronomic qualities. The table was bloated, chock-full of uniformly alabaster ceramics heaping with culinary wonder. We began eating our way down the table, taking in morsel after morsel as we were nudged down the conveyor belt with each new arrival.
The first for us was the same burnt-orange balafruit that O’o had been eating before, plucked directly from a miniature tree sprouting from a tabletop vase. No sooner had we plucked the fruit than another quickly grew to take its place, which O’o informed us was due to the ichor in the pot, a nutrient-rich substance that accelerated growth nearly one-thousandfold. Za’e quickly realized that, when bitten in a certain way, the foam jets sprayed from the balafruit could be weaponized and began playfully antagonizing me by squirting the sweet foam into my eyes.
I quickly got my retribution as we were shuffled down the table to a heaping mountain of slow-roasted whole jeega, small, furry creatures, of which I could easily fit two or three in the palm of my hand. The eight-legged rodentlike creatures were supposed to be eaten whole, and their meat, extremely fatty and tender after being slow-roasted for nineteen hours, practically dissolved in my mouth, leaving only bones remaining. The polite thing to do would be to chew the bones and swallow them but, given that Za’e had already put the pretense of politeness behind us, I chose to spit them at her one at a time, unleashing a skeletal barrage into the aromatically-syrupy colorfully-fluorescent-aquamarine refined luxa nectar she was drinking from a crystal goblet, an action which was met with cries of protest and the hurling of a small dish of toasted kazanuts which rained over me in a hailstorm of barbed shells that hooked onto my robe and would not let go without extreme effort. I escalated the conflict when I, disguising my attack as an act of armistice, held my hand out across the table to “make peace” with Za’e. In reality, I had secreted an oylo dumpling (a thin membrane filled with a viscous paste made of fermented groxon milk mixed with neon-green mipku blood and a variety of spices) into my sleeve, and with a single deft motion, splattered it into her hand as she accepted my gesture of peace.
Of course, this only led to grander and grander culinary assaults on one another as we shifted down the table, eating our fill and weaponizing what we couldn’t fit in our stomachs. We downed plate after plate of deep-fried-green-slime-stuffed starchy roots with a name I never learned, tender cuts of likro with goldenrod feathers still attached, table-tethered-helium-injected-hued-blueish-grey-like-natural-grains-before-they-get-milled-and-bleached breads that floated above our heads, ice-cold magenta stews and soups that changed from sweet yellow to savory orange to spicy and slightly bitter red and back as they heated and cooled, their ingredients stretching and straining under the thermal stimulus, and more, and more, and more.
Down the table, a Senescent nudged the man next to him to get his attention, ate an entire bowl of pickled byyn root and downed the brine, overloading his digestive system with salt, and promptly died when the bile ducts in his neck swelled and exploded into an acrid green mist. This was met with applause and cheers from everyone at the table. Not to be outdone by his friend, the nudged man swallowed a large spoonful of quopol roe before an entire ewer of water and an entire urn of nutrient-rich ichor. Catalyzed by the ichor, the eggs hatched in his stomach, at which point the newly-hatched arthropods followed their instincts and dug outward in all directions, their razor-sharp carapaces cutting through the old man’s stomach before obliterating him, emerging from all directions into a buzzing silver murmuration. Another Senescent, a woman, poured the collected grease drippings from a roast suckling groxon down her gullet and swallowed a lit candle. Her throat and stomach began to glow from within, a pulsing light illuminating her gnarled and clogged vascular system against a red backdrop of skin as the grease caught fire inside of her body. She stood up, took a bow, burped out a single puff of smoke, and crumpled backwards over her bench.
With each death, the body was dumped behind the bench, pushing us closer and closer to the end. Not every death was dramatic – some Senescents quietly died from overindulgence, others bit off more than they could chew and died choking, their red faces turning burgundy as they gasped for air, and still more died simply because their bodies decided it was time. As bodies tipped over, collapsed, gave out, crumpled, expired, and failed, we were pushed farther and farther along, until finally, all the way at the foot of the table, we enjoyed a work of culinary excellence, the main event of the feast, a special dish only eaten during the Festival of Succession: vimmurworm.
Vimmurworm was the culinary synthesis of the festival itself, in the same way that the frenetic mating-dance circle was the musical synthesis. The dish was elegant in its simplicity – a newborn vozu calf, its scaly flesh naturally abundant in the deadliest toxin on Venus, was injected with eggs roughly three days before the festival. These eggs hatched into parasitic worms that could metabolize the vozu toxin into a delicious sweet-and-salty-and-sour-and-bitter-and-savory fluid stored in glands throughout their bodies. Vimmurworm was, simply, those worms eaten alive.
The calf lay helpless on the table, clawed feet bound to one another, leathery wings clipped, beak tied shut. Its breath was shallow, and its eyes were glazed over with feverish agony. Magenta fluid dribbled lazily out of gaping pores scattered across its jet-black body and pooled onto the serving platter where the beast lay. I could not help but be struck with a brief pang of sympathy for this foul creature, forbidden to die at this jamboree of death. I willed the thought away – it was not my business, and besides, it was simply the natural order. Men bound Venus long ago, even before A’o the first, and in doing so, exerted supreme rule over beasts. We could do as we pleased.
I pressed the open end of a crystal jar against one of the oozing pores on the creature. The other end was capped with a rubber bellows, which I squeezed once to create a vacuum and draw out the worms. Two of them were sucked into the jar – I passed one to my mate, our gastronomic battle resolved with laughter and jocular half-promises that it “isn’t over” and that I had better “watch out the next time we eat.” The worm was faceless, eyeless, brainless, little more than a mouth connected to a stomach wrapped in a membrane. It wriggled in my hand. Inside the membrane, though, flowing through channels and ducts was an undeniably un-simple iridescent liquid, shifting across the color spectrum in complex rhythms and undecipherable patterns, catching, absorbing, and reflecting light in ways nothing else ever had or would. This was the elixir that promised a kaleidoscope of flavor, a mind-melting affront to my taste receptors, the objectively most delicious food in the world, in the universe even. This was the Festival of Succession in a morsel – the confluence of life and death, the dazzlingly technicolor grey area suspended between the two. The parasite, barely alive, nothing more than a bundle of tissues operating on chemo-electro-mechanical impulses, and the host, nearly dead, unable to use its body and asymptotically approaching the promise of a blissful oblivion that will not be fulfilled. Two creatures, each victim in their own way to the hedonistic purgatory of the festival, one killed, one kept alive, all to provide us a divine pleasure reserved for the beginning of one’s life and the end. I ate it in a single bite.
The next time I saw my father was five days later. The Senescents were mostly dead by then. The shanty town was torn down, its materials repurposed into a great coliseum under the crystal glare of A’o the Conqueror, as I later learned he was called. What Senescents remained filed to its gates, accepting that there must be an error with their biological self-destruct mechanism. Some died in line, simply running a few days behind schedule, but most made it inside, eager for the death they were promised. No Senescent wanted to leave the festival alive; there was nothing left for them in the world. It didn’t belong to them anymore. So those that hadn’t yet died naturally or killed themselves or consented to being killed by another took up spears and swords and axes and clubs and everything in between and patiently waited their turn to die on the turquoise-stained crystal of the Garden Square while the next generation of Venusians watched.
My father stood larger than life atop a mound of bodies, a perfect replica of the statue towering over him: one knee up, wielding the S-shaped geryx sword and wearing the same conqueror’s snarl. His robe was tied around his waist and girded at his loins, his face spattered with blood. He roared for more. Two groxons were sent in, lean, hungry beasts with mouths watering and twin-tongues lashing because they had been starved for days beforehand. My father leapt down and slew them swiftly, severing the tendons on each hoofed leg before decapitating them both with a single overhead arc of his sword. He hoisted one head by the horn.
“More!” His voice boomed, deeper and more intense than I had ever heard it before.
Senescents began charging in, one at a time, armed with twisted blades of their own. They were no match for him. He deftly parried their blows, dodged their jabs, read their movements; he was always one step ahead. He was unrecognizable to me; I had never seen him use a geryx sword and he was never this coordinated in life. This could not possibly be the same gentle-mannered man who had placed the diadem on my head just days before. He had metamorphosized, become someone else entirely. It was as though our forefather, the towering colossus, had possessed his spirit. He slew man after man, woman after woman; anyone who dared challenge him fell by his hand. They began coming in twos, then threes, then fours. He still did not take a single scratch. It was incredible. Slaughter was an art to this man, A’o. He wielded the geryx like it was his own flesh, decapitating with ease, calmly bisecting at the waist, nonchalantly severing limbs in a fluid whirlwind of glinting steel and crimson flesh and turquoise blood weaving together a brilliant tapestry of death.
“More!” he bellowed.
There were no more Senescents to send in. The beasts that had not been butchered for the feast had already been slain by him. Bodies piled up to the Conqueror’s knees.
Two vozu, fully grown, unbounded and parasite-free, descended from the cloud layer overhead and roosted on the shoulders of the Crystal Conqueror. They howled out with an earsplitting screech, echoed by my father with a guttural roar. He beckoned to them with the geryx, challenging them as if they could understand his intentions.
They hissed as they landed, beating their black leather wings, razor sharp claws clicking on the crystal pavement while they circled the warrior. Their eyes narrowed, full of rage, full of hate for what these people have done to their species. My father lunged at one with the geryx sword. It jumped back just before the blade struck. He stumbled, off balance for less than a second. That was all it took. He tried to whirl around and slash behind him, but it was already over. The vozu behind him cleaved his sword arm off with a single bite from its serrated beak. The first grabbed him by the leg and took off, straight up in the sky. The second followed, pulling at his remaining arm, trying to snatch the prey for itself. The two beasts fought amongst themselves in the sky, rending my father this way and that, ripping off his other arm and both of his legs. It was only then, after all this mutilation, that they finally dropped him, returning to the impenetrable clouds whence they came. My father, armless, legless, plummeted from the sky and, in either a moment of ancestral intervention or absurd coincidence, fell directly onto the tip of the great crystal geryx of A’o the Conqueror, where he remained, skewered, until his final breath moments later.
When the last Senescent on the planet had died, we shed our robes and left. Billions of pilgrims marched naked out of the Crystal City the same way we had come in: on foot. We poured out, returning to whatever town or village we spent our real lives in, ready to take over as the new generation. This world was ours now, we could shape it as we wished, mold it to suit our needs, do with it as we will; it belonged to us, a gift for us to pass down to our children at the next Festival of Succession.
Za’e and I had been walking for half a day by the time the last pilgrim made it out of the city. Even so, we could see its glittering towers distantly on the horizon. We could see when the Flare went up, igniting the city with a cleansing fire. The phosphoric silk burned brilliant white, washing over the decaying ruby flesh and drying aquamarine blood in a wave of absolution. It swallowed up everything – the Garden Square, the shantytown-turned-coliseum-turned-pile-of-bodies, the feast tables, the now-maggot-ridden food scraps, the musical instruments left behind by musicians also left behind, the carefully cultivated gardens, the lost trinkets and belongings and ephemera from the week the entire planet spent compacted in one city. Everything burned with that purifying white light.
And as the Flare ripped through the Crystal City, it acted as an enormous prism: the brilliant white light refracted upward and outward, fractured into a staggering iridescent wave that painted the skies across the planet in a rainbow more vivid and colorful than the most perfect spring day. I took Za’e’s hand and kept walking. It was time to live.