The House of Styx Read online

  The gantry under their feet was just a grille of pressed carbon nanotube filaments. A haze of acidic vapor roiled beneath it. The grille was the only thing beneath their feet for forty-five kilometers. The emptiness after the lightning strike evoked a haunting beauty. Pascal’s hands shook, but he felt alive, electrical himself, part of the shapeless clouds, and despite the pain in his legs, immune to their violence. He belonged to these clouds and they to him.

  “Ostie d’tabarnak,” his father swore. “That was close.”

  Pascal’s breath fogged the inside of his faceplate. His heart thumped. “We saved the cable.”

  His father nodded wanly inside his helmet. “Yeah, we did,” he said, his tone meaning we still lost the trawler.

  “Let’s get inside. My suit may not be patched well.”

  They waited a moment more, listening for the patterns of thunder, before slipping the latch and hurrying to the airlock. They opened it and began rubbing themselves with neutralizing pads. The insides of Pascal’s thighs stung more and more with the characteristic pain of acid burns. It took eight minutes to neutralize right. No one wanted to ever do it wrong. A drop of sulfuric acid where someone could inadvertently touch it was nothing to wish on anyone.

  Hot carbon dioxide blew them dry; they cycled through the airlock and climbed up into the outer layer of the habitat. This ring, more like the inside of a torus, was dark, woody-walled, veined with thick webs of vasculature and spotted on the floor with quietly flexing pumps. This outer ring held one and a half atmospheres of pressure, sixty degrees cooler than the atmosphere outside.

  They moved to the next airlock and cycled through to the wide living area. Alexis, blond and ten years old, stood two meters from them, almost hopping with excitement, but he didn’t cross the line his grandfather had made on the floor. Pascal and his father were still hot to the touch, and they might have missed some acid.

  “Lightning hit the Causapscal! Lightning hit us!” Alexis said.

  Jean-Eudes stood beside Alexis, almost as excited, but also anxious. Jean-Eudes was shorter than his father, and the first flecks of gray spotted his beard at twenty-seven. He worked as an assistant to George-Étienne. He could be fastidiously good at reading dials, cleaning equipment and changing filters, as well as keeping Alexis occupied. Jean-Eudes was Venus’s only Down Syndrome child.

  “Did you see the lightning?” Alexis said. “Did you see it?”

  “It was so loud!” Jean-Eudes said.

  Pascal and George-Étienne hissed open the seals of their helmets and took them off. The air was clean, twenty-six degrees, pressurized to just one atmosphere.

  “You ripped your suit!” Alexis exclaimed, pointing at Pascal’s legs. Jean-Eudes moaned in worry, but didn’t cross the line on the floor.

  “I patched it,” Pascal said.

  His father put down their helmets, shucked his gloves and sat Pascal down right there.

  “Bring me the medical kit, Alexis,” George-Étienne said. “Jean-Eudes, get him some water. Or something stronger if he wants it.”

  Jean-Eudes ran after his bolting nephew, but then turned back uncertainly.

  “You want something stronger, Pascal?”

  “Water is good.”

  The stinging got worse now. George-Étienne unfolded a knife and sliced through the patches and wrapping that Pascal had made around his legs.

  “Any pain under the suit?” he asked.

  Alexis ran up with the medical bag and dropped it beside his grandfather, who pushed him back beyond the line on the floor.

  “A little.”

  George-Étienne looked at the angry red burns on his son’s legs and started dabbing sodium bicarbonate all over them with a soft brush. He gingerly lifted the edges of the shredded pant legs and brushed the paste underneath. He brushed his own fingers similarly, then moved to the next edge.

  “You burn yourself?” Pascal asked through gritted teeth.

  “Not the first time,” his father said, brushing Pascal’s legs more quickly. “You’ll burn your fingers when you have your own children. I lost count of the fingertip burns I got from cleaning up Marthe and Émile and Chloé.” He became quiet. They didn’t usually mention Chloé in front of Alexis.

  “Maman got her legs burnt too?” Alexis asked quietly.

  “Not so much,” George-Étienne said. “Your maman was always too smart to damage her suit. Not like your uncles. Or Marthe. Calvaire, don’t get me started on Marthe. That girl could get an acid burn in her hammock.”

  Despite the tension, that got Alexis giggling. Jean-Eudes knelt beside Pascal with a closed cup of water.

  “How come Jean-Eudes gets to cross the line?” Alexis complained.

  “He doesn’t ask too many questions,” George-Étienne said.

  George-Étienne unsealed Pascal’s suit on the front and began directing Jean-Eudes on taking it off.

  “I can take off my own suit,” Pascal said.

  “I’ll help,” Jean-Eudes said.

  When his suit was peeled down to his waist, they stood him up again and George-Étienne directed Jean-Eudes to hold Pascal from behind, around the chest, in case he fainted. His brother hugged him hard.

  Pascal looked away as his father worked down the suit, took out the tubes and wiped him. The pain was constant, and wouldn’t get worse or better. He didn’t want to look.

  “Ouach!” George-Étienne said in disgust. “You’re going to have some pretty scars. But no one’s going to doubt you’re a man.”

  A queasiness turned over in Pascal’s stomach.

  “As long as I can still use my legs.”

  “Oh, you’ve still got legs,” his father said. “Jean-Eudes, hold him while I take off the rest.”

  His big brother grunted, and lifted him, not so gently, while his father worked off his boots. Alexis stared wide-eyed at the process. He was scared, and George-Étienne sensed it.

  “Can you imagine how many times they had to do this for Marthe?” George-Étienne asked the boy.

  Alexis grinned nervously. “I won’t get burned,” he said.

  “Everyone gets burned a little,” Pascal said. “The trick is practicing so that when it happens, you’re fast and you know what to do.”

  “I know what to do,” his nephew insisted.

  “Sit him back down, Jean-Eudes,” his father said.

  A bit awkwardly, Jean-Eudes lowered him. Pascal pulled his suit to cover his crotch before looking at his legs.

  “No need for modesty,” George-Étienne said.

  Angry red welts had risen under a layer of neutralizing paste on the inside of each thigh. Some spots had burnt black. It stung more now that the adrenaline had ebbed. His toes wiggled. He wasn’t losing blood. The acid had been stopped. His father popped a couple of pills into his hand.

  “These are good ones,” he said. “Can you walk to bed?”

  Pascal took the pills with the water. “I think so.”

  “Good. Jean-Eudes, help him to bed.”

  And his big brother helped him walk slowly to their room.

  TWO

  MARTHE ROSE QUIETLY from the hammock and shivered in the cold. Émile had said he’d fixed the heat circulation system, but it was obviously buggered up again. She pulled the curtain aside to peek at the brightness. The Causapscal-des-Vents floated five kilometers above marbled ocher clouds extending in every direction, out to a horizon that revealed the planetary curve. The bulk of the dirigible’s buoyancy tank blocked the direct sunlight that would have made the three-room habitat too hot. The clouds were deceptively calm, frozen in the moment of a roiling turn, a reaching finger, a changing color. Their deliberateness suggested lethargy, but Venus was anything but slothful. She hid her tantrums with the highest hazes and clouds.

  “Câlisse, I thought you said we would sleep in,” Noëlle said, grumbling from the hammock.

  “Sorry,” Marthe said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Now I can’t sleep.”

  Marthe shiv
ered and padded back to the hammock and slipped under the covers.

  “Don’t be like that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Noëlle huffed and turned her naked back to her. Marthe spooned close, but Noëlle shrugged away the contact, leaving Marthe to stare in frustration.

  “Why do you care?” Marthe said. “You don’t even want to go.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I want to go or not,” Noëlle grumbled. “You should go with me.”

  “You hate those people. So do I.”

  “Do you want us to stay in all the time?”

  “What would Délia say if she saw us there?” Marthe asked. “You just want to make her jealous.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Gossip gets to my ears just like anyone else’s.”

  “You should know what they say about you, then,” Noëlle said.

  “I know what they say about me, and I know what they invent about me when they get bored.”

  “‘The ice bitch’, they say...” Noëlle said, sneering.

  Marthe laughed. “That’s what you think I care about?”

  Noëlle threw the covers off, onto Marthe, and hopped from the hammock. Marthe enjoyed the view. Where her own skin was cloud-pale, Noëlle came by hers from Haitian Québécois ancestors. Marthe’s liaisons with Noëlle were shallow and brief, whenever Noëlle and Délia were on the outs, but Marthe hoped that something more might be possible. Until one of them blew up about something, like now. Noëlle finished pissing loudly in the head, took a paste-pack from the cooler, and then started putting on her survival suit. Marthe came off the hammock.

  “Let me help you.”

  Noëlle swatted her hands away. “I’ll cycle myself out.”

  “Fine! Do that!” Marthe said.

  She flopped back into the hammock and covered herself against the cold. Noëlle left in a huff, making sure to kick and slam things on the way to the airlock. After a time, the Causapscal-des-Vents quieted, but for the creaking of age and the snaps of pressure changes as the slow leaks all over the habitat triggered compressed air to replenish the atmosphere.

  Her brother hadn’t been here when she’d arrived, drunk, with Noëlle, and she didn’t hear anything now. It was just the two of them up here, sixty-five kilometers above the surface of Venus, living in a piece-of-crap habitat she was embarrassed to show Noëlle.

  Causapscal-des-Vents was in some ways better than Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, where her father lived with two of her brothers and her sister’s son. Marthe floated in the speeding winds of the high atmosphere, flying over the outspread fields of heaven. The bitterly cold, sunlit heights had only thin, ghostly turbulences, and the acidic spite of Venus had to struggle to reach them here. She sometimes succeeded, but not like down home. The spots and ridges of red acid scars on her hands and arms and neck attested to that.

  Still, she missed the depths: her family, the sweltering heat of their habitat, the struggle to pit her cunning against Venus to stay alive and scrape some subsistence from the deep clouds. And if she had been with her family in Causapscal-des-Profondeurs, she wouldn’t be fighting with her words, making enemies and no friends.

  But she wouldn’t have Noëlle either, not even for a night. She would be lonely in different ways.

  Pascal might be lonely. He was sixteen now, and stuck with a cranky old man, a child nephew and an adoring brother. Pascal was smart, funny, and good-looking. He needed company his own age. And given how poorly Émile had been doing here, maybe they ought to switch. Her father and Émile could try to make up, though that was a long shot. And she could look after Pascal. Introduce him to some girls. Or boys. Whatever.

  She had other people to take care of too. She had two messages on her pad from families in the depths. Réal Chartier’s family needed their insulin supply increased. The med computer said Réal’s insulin dose was too low, but central supply didn’t want to increase it without a doctor saying so, and the doctors were all waitlisted. The Chartiers had given Marthe their proxy vote in l’Assemblée because she could often persuade the ration managers.

  The Cousin family at fifty-fourth rang had gotten their oxygen ration late last time, and only a half-ration this time. They borrowed from other deep families for now, but Marthe knew what was happening. Oxygen supplies were low for everyone. The systems that cracked carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen were broken on one habitat; on another, the solar cells weren’t working. Repair crews were getting ready to switch the solar cells from one habitat to another next week. Marthe would see if Pa could spare some oxygen. He would grumble about it, though. He could get more for his oxygen on the black market. And the D’Aquillons needed any boost they could get.

  A loud hiss sounded. She rolled out of the hammock and ran toward the source. Near the back of the gondola, at the airlock to the engines, a seal hissed.

  Câlisse!

  Émile was supposed to maintain the Causapscal-des-Vents. That was his job. Either he hadn’t done it, or he hadn’t done it right. The lazy jackass wasn’t even here.

  She lit a cigarette, took a drag and watched where and how fast the smoke moved. Sound could mask multiple leaks. This turned out to be a solitary leak, but it couldn’t wait. Still naked, she pulled out a small slow welder and a patch kit.

  Goddamn Émile.

  Apply epoxy and putty over the hole. Press in. Don’t trust the seal. Use the heat gun to soften the putty. Paint the area with adhesive. Place the plastic laminate. Take a piece of metal. Weld.

  Her cigarette had burned down to her lips by the time she finished, and she’d burned her finger with the welder.

  Goddamn Émile.

  THREE

  THE HABITAT BUCKED on the edge of an eddy, then resumed its creaking sway. In the other hammock, Jean-Eudes snored softly. Remnants of sunlight, attenuated by kilometers of clouds, still pushed through the woody chambers, outlining shadowy veins flowing with acidic sap. Scratchy eyes open, staring blankly ahead, Pascal couldn’t summon the energy to move.

  If he didn’t move, he could feel like part of the habitat—serviceable, elegantly functional, if ugly and meaningless. His body felt as if it were at a remove, strange and alien. Tough stubble caught on his pillow, and the feeling worsened. He didn’t want to get up. But he couldn’t leave anything on his face. He couldn’t think about it.

  He swung out of his hammock. The woody floor was warm. He opened a flap and pissed into a tiny urinal made of the same tough plant fiber as the rest of Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Water was valuable, and so was nitrogen; the filtration system would reclaim it.

  He moved to the sink without turning on a light. A tiny mirror hung above it, but he’d learned not to look into it. He mixed a bit of water with paste to make a lather and steeled himself to rub it onto his face. Touching his... the stubble... was strange, disorienting. He did it quickly. Every day, the hair seemed to be so thick he couldn’t stand it, even though it was still only a fuzz compared to Jean-Eudes’s beard.

  Pascal closed his eyes, guiding the straight razor by touch, taking his mind elsewhere, as if touching someone else’s face. The scraping tugs made him queasy, but he’d gotten faster every day since his father had taught him to shave. He rinsed the razor in the bit of water in the sink, flushed it and dried himself.

  A child’s voice sounded outside, followed by a squeal. Pascal quietly pulled aside the curtain, woven of old plant fiber. The main room of the habitat, a toroidal space about twelve meters across, centered on the trunk of the great Venusian plant they lived in. The woody walls sloped, worn smooth by feet and bumps and the living of day-to-day. Light chairs and uneven brown tables gave shape to an eating and living space. Near the thick trunk, big batteries, compressed air, and radio and radar equipment rested on platforms over tangles of wires. In the floor, the main pumps, a small field of muscular valves, slowly pushed carbon dioxide out of the habitat into the two atmospheres of pressure outside.

  His father crept around the big room with exaggerated step
s. Alexis hid under the table, staring at Pascal with wide, excited eyes. Then George-Étienne swept down and tickled him. The ten-year old squealed.

  “Careful, Alexis,” Pascal said, “you’ll use up all the oxygen.”

  The boy paid him no mind and rolled on the floor, listening to his voice change as his chest and back thumped on the wood. George-Étienne hugged Pascal and then continued his game with Alexis, which turned into a wrestling struggle on the floor. Alexis always wanted to roughhouse and Pascal never did. He sometimes felt like a bad uncle, but tried squashing those feelings as much as he could. Everyone felt out of place sometimes.

  A picture of his mother hung on the wall over the table. Pascal barely remembered her. He’d been very young when she’d been injured. They’d been too deep to get her to the doctors twenty kilometers up. And even if they hadn’t been, la colonie had been on the other side of the planet at the time. Her absence outlined a weird gap in his life, a shape whose contours he could neither understand nor ignore. An itch.

  He knew that she’d loved him, all of them, and that she’d loved Venus as much as he did. A rust-spotted mirror hung beside her picture, so that any of the children could look at themselves and at her at the same time, to see her in themselves.

  He saw bits of her in Jean-Eudes, and bits of his father. His precise memories of Marthe and Émile were fading. Marthe hadn’t been down in a year, and Émile had left five years ago. But they too looked like both their parents. Pascal only looked at his reflection beside his mother’s picture. He’d been growing out his hair for some time. Sometimes, when he pulled it the way she wore hers in the picture, he could see her in him, and the gap faded.

  “She was beautiful, eh?” George-Étienne said from under a struggling Alexis.

  Pascal nodded. “Oui.”

  “No sleep?”

  Pascal shook his head.

  “Me neither,” George-Étienne said. “I was always jealous of your mother. She could sleep through anything, anywhere, anytime. You should have taken after her.”