The House of Styx Page 9

  “Why did they send so many?” Pascal asked. “Who sent them down here?”

  “One probe is something,” George-Étienne said, “a fluke. But what country sends down ten, all in one cave, unless they’re after something?”

  “We only see the wrecks of their tries,” Pascal said. “They must have gotten what they wanted.”

  His father hrrumphed, and kept reeling in the cage.

  “If they hadn’t got what they wanted, they’d still be here. Any country could have claimed Venus before Québec did. The Americans, the Banks, China, and Egypt got to every good place before we got a say.”

  “The radio signal is farther on,” Pascal said.

  George-Étienne pointed meaningfully at the internal temperature of the bathyscaphe. One hundred and forty-two degrees. And Pascal eyed the time. Alexis would be able to hold the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs in place for a while, but no one could keep it there forever. If he and Pa stayed too long down here, making their rendezvous with the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs would get complicated, since neither Alexis or Jean-Eudes knew enough to take out a little flyer safely. And Pascal and George-Étienne couldn’t ask for help without people finding out they had the bathyscaphe.

  The weird radio distress call still bleeped, more powerful deeper in the cave.

  “In a few minutes, the salvage will be up,” George-Étienne said. “How long will it take to pull us out?”

  “Not too long,” Pascal said, paying out more cable on the camera.

  The view skimmed over the graveyard of wrecked probes. The lamp showed the outlines of fifteen. Twenty.

  “What were they looking for?” Pascal whispered.

  He gave slack to the camera. The main current swept it along. The cave ahead widened into dark. The pressure dropped to only a few atmospheres, and the temperature dropped into the liquid water range. Then the pressure and temperature readings stopped working. They had dropped below the range of what the camera could measure. The radio signal was stronger.

  “Got it!” George-Étienne said.

  The probe was only eight meters ahead of the bathyscaphe.

  “We have to go, Pascal,” he said.

  “Pa.”

  The feed from the camera showed stars. Thousands and thousands of stars, in the cold black of space.

  THIRTEEN

  ÉMILE WAS CLINGING to the outside of the Causapscal-des-Vents when he spotted the approaching flyer. There was no way to know who it was, but he knew the way his sister flew, and it wasn’t Marthe. The movements were less elegant and economical. They never received visitors in this shitty old habitat.

  It would take the flyer another ten minutes to get here, and it was a pain in the ass to get up the side of the envelope of their dirigible, so he worked faster, rubbing in an oil that contained a base to neutralize any acid that managed to get this high in the atmosphere. The job also allowed him to check for leaks or wearing in the fabric of the plastic. It was mind-numbing in the worst way.

  The whole envelope of the dirigible was multilayered. The first, inner layer was gray-black carbon weave, containing oxygen and nitrogen at pressures far lower than the ambient pressure of this altitude. This inner envelope was covered with solar cells to generate electricity to run engines, life support, and small-scale industry. The solar cells rarely got damaged, so he rarely had to check them.

  A second layer of transparent plastic fiber surrounded the dirigible. It was pressurized to half an atmosphere and filled with greenhouse trays, crops, algae tanks and photosynthetic bioreactors. The gardens on Causapscal-des-Vents had overgrown and he’d better get in there soon to harvest, replant, and refertilize. La colonie had people, but not a lot of metal for automation, so a lot of the crops grew on elbow grease. In the case of Causapscal-des-Vents, his hands and Marthe’s. Whatever they grew was more than enough to feed him and Marthe, but because of his father’s stand against the government, all the real food for his father, Pascal, Alexis, and Jean-Eudes was dropped down by drone from here.

  The flyer was definitely headed for him. He’d covered about an eighth of the outer surface of the envelope. Whatever. He could finish it tomorrow. He climbed back up the ropes and ladders to the work area and flat landing platform on the roof. He arrived just as his visitor flared their gauzy wings and alighted unsteadily on two feet.

  He reached a steadying hand and Thérèse hugged him. His heart leapt.

  He helped remove her wings and tied them down. Then they cycled through the airlock and down the ladder through the envelope to the tight living area in the gondola. They removed their helmets. Her blood-filled eye had mostly cleared to pink, and the once-black eye bruising was almost unnoticeable. She slinked closer and kissed him.

  “Have you been doing enough work to keep your sister off your back?” she asked.

  “I haven’t been high for days,” he said. “Got a joint?”

  She hefted a pack on her waist, smiling.

  “Is your sister around?”

  “Of course not. She’s off with l’Assemblée.”

  “What does l’Assemblée even do? Talk, talk, talk. Peel me out of this thing?”

  He kissed her and began unsealing her suit. She returned the favor, then pulled a small bag of weed out of her pack and rolled them a joint. He pulled her to his tiny living space and hooked his hammock into eyelets on the walls. She lit the joint and took a long draw. He watched her longingly. Then it was his turn.

  He filled his lungs. It was like inhaling skunky food. Officially, drugs were verboten on Venus, but with so many distant habitats floating in a great armada, the government couldn’t enforce much. Despite this, no one had gotten the recipe right. The sulfuric taste of Venus made its way into most of what they grew. The taste could be hidden with good cooking, but no such luck for weed. A light buzz crept over him. He exhaled, satisfied. Thérèse was laying carbon stencils on the hammock, beside a personal first aid kit and a small glass bottle with a tiny brush in the cap.

  “What’s this?”

  “Aciding,” she said. “It’s a new stencil I want. Do you want the same one?”

  She touched his forearm, where raised red welts erupted like a bare mountain range from the dark hair.

  He and Chloé and their father had been trying to tie a new gantry under the then-new habitat, what was now the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. There hadn’t even been an accident, just a pinhole piercing of the suit’s arm from wear and tear. He’d felt the burning and thought it had been a small one. An hour later, when the pain got worse and they all went in, they found a blistered redness the size of his palm. It was stupid, not paying attention, something a fifteen-year old would do. Thérèse loved to run her fingers along his scars. After he’d shucked his self-consciousness about them, he loved letting her.

  Thérèse mostly lacked those marks of Venus’s touch. Her leanness bore only a few acid burns, and parallel lines of blade scars, old and fresh, along the inside of her forearm. But deliberate aciding scars coiled up her arms and legs. Artists had applied acids to her body with stencils in the shapes of vines and leaves, nature that didn’t exist here. Thérèse wore these as an evocation to Venus, the kind of thinking behind sympathetic magic.

  The aciding artists timed the neutralizing step to get the right burn depth. And they could texture the burns by applying faint, thin lines or hatching, or by weakening the acid with additives. The only thing they could not control was the color of the scars. The vines coiling up her arms and legs assumed the same color as every other scar he’d seen: red. Venus only inked in blood.

  “Something’s changing,” she said, running her hands up the earthly vines. “These were meant for bringing life from another world to here. It’s time for me to worship this world. Looking on Venus with unfiltered eyes was the first step. We need to take what is hers, take her beauties, and honor her with those totems on our bodies.” She ran her hands over her naked hips meaningfully, although he wasn’t sure of her meaning.

  He pic
ked up one of the stencils. It was flexible carbon, about twenty centimeters long, with a cut-out of a trawler’s silhouette. The garlic bulb shape, bloated and distended, with a few lines left in to give it stylized depth, connected in a straight, narrow line to the outline of a bob. He knew the image well. He’d grown up in one.

  She put the joint between his lips and he sucked deeply.

  “I’m thinking of putting that one right here,” she said, indicating her shoulder, running her fingertips down to her elbow.

  “Have you ever seen a trawler?” he asked, taking the joint from his lips.

  She shook her head. He handed the joint back to her.

  “Trawlers are enough to make you believe in a god, or goddess,” he said. “They’re so elegant. They make so much sense that it’s hard to believe that nature made them. The intention and belonging behind them are palpable.”

  She butted out the joint and put the remains carefully back in her pouch.

  “They float in complete silence,” he said. “Forty-eight kilometers of dark, poisonous, baking atmosphere beneath them. Thirty kilometers of bright, poisonous, cooling atmosphere above them. Nothing around them but clouds and haze. They bob up and down, triggering the release of static between clouds, feeding themselves on the electricity of embryonic storms.”

  “I want to see one,” Thérèse said.

  “But they’re not always quiet,” he continued with a longing pang in him. “When a storm is coming, some winds can set their cables vibrating, resonating like a guitar string, and a trawler will play a single, solid note for twenty minutes as it comes upon the storm. And every length of cable is different and so they all have slightly different notes, like a choir.”

  “They sing to Venus?” she said wonderingly. “Worshipping her?”

  “Down there, the pressure is two or even three atmospheres, and it’s all heavier carbon dioxide, and hotter, so the notes travel quick and far, a lot farther and louder than they would up here.”

  “Why haven’t you shown me your poetry?”

  There was nothing mocking in her eyes. And yet he held back, shy about what he had inside, what he tried to create.

  “C’est d’la marde.”

  “You have the soul of a poet.”

  “Venus doesn’t need poets, I guess,” he said. “It needs leak-fixers.”

  “Venus needs poets more,” Thérèse said. “It needs painters, even if the only canvases we have are ourselves.”

  He picked at the other stencils. One was a sphere, what they’d always called a blastula. More beautiful yet was the stencil outlining a rosette, which was like a small trawler, but with a stumpy hanging tail and a frond rising from its peak like the leaf from an apple stem.

  “Do you want to acid me?” she asked.

  “I’m not that kind of artist,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”

  “You won’t make a mistake,” she said. “Then I’ll acid you.”

  He considered the stencil of the trawler. He’d been born in a trawler.

  “Do me first,” he said, handing her the stencil.

  “We’re doing this for Venus,” she said, “so you have to tell me something true about yourself.”

  He shrugged to cover sudden unease. He wasn’t as interesting as Thérèse. He wasn’t as interesting as most of her crowd.

  “Voyons,” she said, wiping his arm with a damp cloth. “You’re not a good boy. Did you get into a lot of trouble when you were little?”

  “I was never little.”

  She laughed. “Tell me a bit.”

  She laid the stencil against his arm. Spatter-burns marred his right upper arm, but his left from shoulder to elbow was pristine. She stood beside him and her nose came up to his triceps. Her fingers were cool and appreciative, but her breath was warm. Her nearness felt like being surrounded in a different kind of cloud, one that had nothing to do with buzz from the joint.

  “I don’t know. When I was eighteen, and Marthe was already up here, Pa found out I’d traded stuff away for some hash.”

  Thérèse giggled. “What’s the problem?”

  “We didn’t have much. I hid my own food and later on traded it away with a coureur at fiftieth rang we intercepted every few months. His daughter had gotten hash from up here. Pa was angry I’d traded away my food when Pascal and Chloé and Alexis were hungry. I didn’t think they were hungry. He was angry I was doing harder drugs, but he was apoplectic that I’d managed to organize it all without him knowing. I’d sent secret messages using a radio relay on one of our trawler herd. He’s a paranoid bastard and was probably worried about the government knowing where we were.”

  “I bet he liked how sneaky you were,” she said. “You could earn his love through drug drops.”

  “I don’t want anything from him. Certainly not his love,” Émile said derisively.

  Thérèse pressed the stencil against him and held the little paintbrush.

  “You don’t care if it hurts?” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “Sometimes only hurting can make us feel alive,” she said.

  She pressed her lips to the skin not covered by the stencil on his shoulder. That skin would soon be gone, and what came after wouldn’t feel anything. He didn’t know if he was numb. But he understood what she meant. Sometimes pain was like a light by which to see the soul. He didn’t fit anywhere, neither in the clouds, nor in the sun, not in his family, not outside of it, not sober, not high, not drunk. Except around Thérèse. They’d only met a couple of months ago, and now she was painting Venus on him.

  The tiny brush tickled his skin, leaving cold and stinging heat in its wake. The sting continued to his nostrils. Sulfur and sulfur dioxide, and the smell of oxidizing flesh. He didn’t flinch. He’d felt worse. She dipped the brush in the bottle, dabbed it off, and dragged it further down the stencil. His skin reddened. This was just before blistering. Leaving it on would char the skin black as the acid dissolved its way into the fascia and muscle.

  From the first aid kit, Thérèse pulled out a burn pad soaked in sodium bicarbonate paste and an ice pack. She carefully dabbed at the burn, neutralizing the acid, and pressed the ice pack against dying skin. She took away the stencil and continued to dab with the base cloth and cool with the ice pack.

  “It looks so good,” she said.

  It stung. He knew acid burns. It would sting for hours. He raised his arm to see. The line of the trawler’s cable was straight, following the topography of his muscle. The mark was angry red right now, but would calm. She laid a dressing along the new mark, and then gently wound a bandage around his arm. She stroked the arm lovingly.

  “You’re worshipping her now. You already have, in your own way,” she said, touching the ropey old scars on his hands and then kissing them, “but now it’s more true, more meaningful.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her. “You’re worshipping her too.”

  “I don’t feel it.”

  He touched the still-bruised skin under her eyes.

  “You gave Venus her due,” he said. “You created worshippers out of nothing. She must love you.”

  She shook her head, stroking the low scars on his right arm. “To get souls, to belong to the Earth, our ancestors paid in pain and blood, over hundreds of millennia. We’re the ancestors here, nearly the first people. We have to learn Venus’s price to make this a real home.”

  “Everyone is giving something.”

  “Lots of people give nothing,” she said. “They worry about seals and crops, but don’t think of belonging.”

  Thérèse stroked the bandage on his arm. They kissed slowly, for a long time.

  “Acid me now,” she said.

  FOURTEEN

  THEY DIDN’T SPEAK more than a few words on the way up. Pascal had wound back the cable carrying the camera as fast as he could, but the temperature in the bathyscaphe edged to one hundred and forty-eight. There was only so much the Stirling engines and the insulation on the cra
ft could do. Pascal began retracting the other cable that held them to the boulder sixty meters to stern before the camera was even up, pulling the bathyscaphe out of the cave and into the heavy wind. He pulled them back and back and back, while the cage and their salvage spun ahead of them on its line.

  One hundred and fifty degrees inside the bathyscaphe.

  One hundred and fifty-one.

  This was beyond the tolerances of their survival suits.

  Still the camera wheeled back, bumped against rocky projections, tossing in the turbulences. Much of the data had been sent to them by radio, but so much more, and of so much higher quality, remained in the memory on the camera and on the radio receiver.

  Pascal and his father stared ahead, stunned. Or hallucinating.

  They’d seen stars.

  That was Venus’s secret.

  Beneath her atmospheric finery lay a wrinkled gray and black surface no one could love. But buried beneath that ugliness was the true Venus, a starscape, a kind of beauty Pascal had never seen. He didn’t understand her, but he’d seen her inner beauty.

  One hundred and fifty-two degrees. Two degrees past the tolerances of the suits. Inside their suits was probably forty-five degrees, but he didn’t want to look. Looking wouldn’t help.

  “We have to go,” George-Étienne said a bit numbly. Sweat ran in his faceplate and his eyelids drooped.

  One hundred and fifty-three. The camera and radio receiver had a hundred meters of cable between themselves and the surface.

  “I know,” Pascal said.

  George-Étienne punched the emergency system and four oxygen tanks outside the bathyscaphe emptied their contents into four silvery bags, which inflated like limp raisins. The ninety-three atmospheres of pressure compressed the bags so that they did not look inflated, but the difference in weight between the heavier carbon dioxide and the lighter oxygen, when added to the natural buoyancy of the bathyscaphe, lifted them until they dangled over the boulder that had been anchoring them, bobbing in the slow, heavy wind.

  Forty meters of cable separated the camera from them.