The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  The Causapscal-des-Profondeurs rocked, and the thrum of propellers vibrated low in his feet.

  “Close to full speed?” Pascal said curiously.

  “The volcanoes of Atla Regio are rumbling.”

  Pascal felt the slow rock of the habitat like a sailor on Earth might have known his ship and the ocean around it. The deep clouds of Venus felt natural. He’d lived his whole life wrapped in them. The thrum of the props wasn’t the only vibration; thunder shook the atmosphere, a long way off, maybe a couple of days.

  Venus’s rages could be astonishing. Some of her volcanoes blew metal-rich ash dozens of kilometers into the atmosphere, where storms might swirl the dust even higher, to where filmy plant membranes could catch it. And they could collect those plants and that dust in the depths. It was still impractical to mine the surface for metals on an industrial scale, so la colonie was desperate for metal and had to import it from asteroidal colonies. In good months, the D’Aquillon family could trade a dozen kilos of iron, lead and silicates on the black market, or to the government.

  But that wasn’t why his father had them heading south, past Atla Regio.

  Pascal padded to the navigational screen. Their course had changed sharply overnight, tracing a southerly path over the volcanically inactive plains of Rusalka Planitia to intersect, eventually, with the Diana Chasma, the deepest place on the surface of Venus. Pascal knew where that would take them.

  “You really want to do this?” he asked.

  “I finished fixing the old probe,” George-Étienne said.

  “The bathyscaphe? I thought it didn’t work.”

  “Non, the old probe with the bad Stirling engines. I dropped it about an hour ago.”

  When Pascal was ten years old, George-Étienne had made a really, really good trade with another coureur who happened to be the son of Marie-Claude Duvieusart, the first coureur des vents and the first person ever to reach the surface of Venus. The bathyscaphe she’d used was six hundred kilos of steel and, even then, overengineered and antique. The government had never found out that the D’Aquillon family owned it, and didn’t even know it still existed. It was so secret that Pa had never shown Émile, Jean-Eudes, or Alexis, although Marthe knew about it. George-Étienne had resisted all occasions to scrap and sell it, and he’d even gone to the surface twice himself.

  But sending down the probe made more sense. Despite the odds of losing a hundred kilos of metal in a probe, they sometimes sent them all the way down to the surface to salvage easy-to-reach metal, or even to drop off mining equipment whose components could survive a few days at those depths.

  “How long?”

  “We’ll be there this afternoon,” George-Étienne said.

  They breakfasted on vat-grown algae and on a desulfurized stew of Venusian plants before Pascal went to the daily work of maintaining the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs. Very little automation was possible in the clouds of Venus. La colonie already had few metals, and the acid of the clouds attacked them relentlessly.

  For forty years, la colonie had been bioengineering the Venusian cloud-living plants, exploiting their buoyancy, their ability to harness electricity from the clouds, and the parasitic plants that clung to them. But even the toughest plant habitats occasionally burst from pressure or temperature differences, or succumbed to acids or parasites. So every day, the woody valves and seals and pumps had to be checked, neutralized, the batteries changed, the new water flushed into long-term storage tanks, and so on. The inner mechanical parts, like the computers and communications equipment, needed to be inspected and re-protected from acid, and the ones on the outside likewise.

  Pascal loved Venus, felt safe in the layered, pressure-resistant habitats in the middle and lower cloud decks. A few times, he and his father had taken trawlers deeper into the atmosphere, all the way to the base of the sub-cloud haze, breaking through into the clear air that began at about thirty-three kilometers.

  He’d seen the face of majestic Venus herself: vast plains of corrugated basalt, low mountains, flat, circular plateaus, high mountains and volcanoes. Before him, George-Étienne had taken Pascal’s older sister Chloé, his brother Émile, and his next sister Marthe. Only a handful of the Venusian colonistes had ever seen naked Venus. It was an experience of awe for George-Étienne, a rite of passage he needed to share with his children.

  Only Jean-Eudes had not been able to go. It was too dangerous for anyone who couldn’t handle all the equipment themselves. Pascal, the youngest, had gone down several times now that most of his brothers and sisters lived elsewhere. It had been a year since the last time, and Venus called him again. With Chloé gone, George-Étienne and Pascal were raising Alexis, so they’d hesitated to go again in person, but sending a probe was the next best thing. Pascal found himself itching by the controls at the trunk, waiting for the probe to break through the clouds.

  Jean-Eudes came up behind his chair and put a warm hand on his shoulder. “Is it scary?”

  The monitor showed the yellow mist of the lower cloud deck whipping past the cameras of the descending probe. Thirty-one kilometers. Two hundred degrees Celsius. Nine atmospheres of pressure.

  “Not for the probe,” Pascal said. “It’s been built to survive all the way down to the surface.”

  “And the acid!” Alexis said helpfully.

  His nephew had grown bored of the images of the descent. He’d seen recordings of other probes and even some of the ones George-Étienne had made on his own journeys. He lay on his back, rolling a ball up the rounding floor, seeing how high he could get it before it rolled back. Alexis’s body was new-born perfect, unblemished; Venus had never touched him.

  Jean-Eudes turned his palms up, then down. The same lines and spots of red wrinkled scar tissue that every Venusian eventually carried marked his hands too. Acid frightened Jean-Eudes. Pascal took his brother’s hands in his fingers. His own bore their generous share of ropey scars.

  “The metal is coated with carbon. Soon, it will be so hot outside the probe that it can’t even rain. No rain means no acid.”

  “Were you scared when you went?” Jean-Eudes asked.

  Thirty kilometers.

  “A little bit,” he said. “Pa took care of me. Do you want to go someday? With me?”

  Jean-Eudes looked unconvinced. “Look!” he said, pointing at the monitor.

  “What? What?” Alexis shrieked, coming close.

  The mist had cleared and the yawning darkness of Venus’s surface loomed below, lit a diffuse yellow. In a few spots, ember-like orange glowed at the base of towers of black smoke. That wasn’t so normal. The volcanoes were busy. The sub-cloud haze still surrounded the probe, but in patches, none of which obstructed the view. He pulled Alexis onto his lap and pointed at the screen.

  “Look. See that’s Atahensik Corona, and—”

  “That means crown!” Alexis said.

  “—and on one side is the Dali Chasma, a long trench. And there’s Ceres Corona—”

  “Like the Bank!” Alexis interrupted again.

  “And right there, that long line is Diana Chasma, the deepest place in all of Venus.”

  “The deepest?” Alexis asked.

  “That’s where papa keeps his storm,” Jean-Eudes said.

  FOUR

  ÉMILE D’AQUILLON CYCLED into the airlock in the base of the Baie-Comeau, the largest floating habitat in the entire colonie. Twelve floors of shiny metal and plastic housed the government, some key manufacturing efforts, meetings of l’Assemblée, and apartments for some two hundred people. It was the future. They’d learned enough about Venus that someday, dirigibles of this size would house whole villages of people, and even bigger ones would be possible.

  Thérèse leaned against him, survival suit to survival suit, distant intimacy. He stroked her arm through their suits nonetheless. Her hand pressed against his crotch, through layers of padding and insulation and acid-resistant films. He wanted to respond. The airlock finished cycling, and the door opened into the lower
engineering areas of the Baie-Comeau. Thérèse sometimes worked down here. It was quiet and empty, if a little chilly. A good place to get romantic. He hissed open the seal on his helmet and took it off. Émile reached for the seals on the front of his suit, but she stilled his hand as she pulled off her helmet.

  “Patience, Roméo,” she said.

  She pulled a flask from a suit pocket and took a swallow before passing it to him. He groaned. He’d been aching for a drink. He tipped it back and coughed before swallowing. She laughed at him as it scoured on the way down.

  “Whose bagosse is it?” he wheezed.

  “Ninety-six proof,” she said.

  He coughed again, sniffed at the neck of the flask and took another swallow. The burning down his throat settled in his stomach like a weight. He’d needed this badly. His own stock had run dry a day ago.

  “It kicks harder than anything I’ve ever made,” he said.

  She took back the flask and took three swallows.

  Everyone made bagosse, although it was lightly illegal. Using corn and grain rations to make alcohol wasted needed calories. Even diverting compostable food waste to ferment bitter chasse-cousin was against the law. He’d gone hungry himself a few times as a child during food shortages in la colonie. Not that the rations for the D’Aquillon family were ever of the highest quality, or on time.

  Thérèse spun the wheel on a big steel door. It was beautiful: clean, uncorroded, almost shiny. She stepped into a larger bay where nine people in survival suits already milled around, flasks in hand. On the front was a wall-to-floor-to-ceiling door, so that larger objects like small planes and drones could be winched into the Baie-Comeau.

  Thérèse was greeted with hugs and kisses, some kisses more deep and long-lasting than Émile liked. He knew most of them. Some of these artists and sculptors and poets were good. Some still sought their voices, like him. They toasted each other. Émile started to feel a slight buzz. Thérèse took his hand and leaned against him.

  “Do you trust me?” she whispered.

  Émile nodded, emptying her flask. “What is this?” he asked playfully. “A performance? A reading? An orgy?”

  “Worship,” she said, “of Venus.”

  She planted a kiss on his cheek, then spun away, moving to the bay door, trailed by gloved clapping and last-minute swills from flasks. She bowed theatrically with her hand on the bay door controls, then held up her helmet in one hand as her eyes narrowed. Her ennui was knowing, like the weight of ennui had stamped her with secret, exhausting truth. Her smile, beneath that exhaustion, was courageous, a stab at the darkness. She was so powerful, so real, a human truth.

  “On n’est pas chez nous,” Thérèse said. “We are not home. We live in boxes of metal and plastic. We never touch the wind. We never touch the rain. We see the stars and sun only through glass.”

  Her eyes became dreamy, staring into a distance that could not be contained by the bay.

  “We can’t find our souls like this,” she said, “hidden away in houses in the skies, cut off from one another and from nature. We wither. We drink.”

  A woman beside Émile hooted. A deep-voiced man said solemnly, “We drink.”

  “We cut,” Thérèse said, stroking her raised forearm, buried beneath layers of survival suit. “We acid,” she said, touching the tiny scars on her face with glove tips. “We fuck.”

  “We fuck,” someone behind Émile repeated.

  “All this just to feel not-dead, because we have no souls,” Thérèse said. “We create poetry, murals, sculptures—striving, reaching ephemera, trying to show we exist—but we can’t mean anything. The rat in a lab has no soul.”

  “No soul,” Émile whispered.

  “I’m the rat in the lab,” Thérèse said, with a crack in her voice. “The Earth is dead to me, a fantasy, a vision. I’ve never seen it. And I’ve never taken Venus into my heart. I don’t belong here because Venus hasn’t embraced me. I’ve never courted her as she deserves, never worshipped her sunrise with authenticity in my heart.”

  Émile’s thoughts followed her languidly. The bagosse was hitting him harder.

  “Venus is a lover who takes us only with pain,” she said, “not because she’s cruel. She’s alien, unknowable, unfathomable, but her price is the same price as any goddess: she wants to be embraced.”

  “Embrace her,” the man beside Émile whispered.

  “I’m going to embrace her,” Thérèse said. “I will touch her with my lungs. I will look upon her with my naked eyes. We seek to make ourselves whole.”

  “Whole,” Émile whispered. He felt it, deeply. He wanted to mean something.

  “No one need come with me,” Thérèse said. “This is my quest.”

  Thérèse put her helmet back on and Émile’s heart thumped to bursting with wanting her, to be important to her, to be part of her life. The others were putting on their helmets. Émile snapped his on and sealed it with automatic movements. He looked at the world through glass again, felt the world through gloves, heard the world through speakers. He was alone, cut off from everyone, from the world itself.

  A red light flashed on the wall. A hiss sounded briefly, then quieted, as if noise itself were being bleached of meaning. When the pumps had removed enough of the air, vents opened on the bay door and the last breath puffed away in a gasp.

  The flashing became more insistent, and the bay door lifted, hinged along the top, revealing at first a flat beam of sunlight reflected off yellow clouds. The light widened into a blade that cut across the ceiling, lowering and expanding until the cloudshine of Venus kissed their foreheads. Émile squinted at the brightness.

  The bay door finished opening, leaving before them a square of blinding light. They stood still in shadows, hidden from direct sun and from Venus, while puffy fields of sulfuric acid stretched away into infinity. They could sail these airy seas forever and never come to shore. Venus had no shore. That was a truth of Venus the human heart couldn’t grasp. She told them stories they couldn’t understand.

  Émile swayed on his feet, the bagosse making his hearing and movements indistinct, blurry. He swayed around the people, to Thérèse.

  Her gloved hand went to the neck of her helmet. Her faceplate fogged with her rapid breathing and then her heroic exhalation. She popped the seals and her eyes widened. She took off her helmet and blinked in the bitter cold. Her face and eyes reddened in an atmosphere only a tenth of what she’d just been breathing. And she stared out onto the clouds with her naked eyes, struggling to take the raw carbon dioxide into her lungs.

  Of its own volition, Émile’s hand rose and snapped open the seals at his neck. Even drunk, he knew his training. He exhaled and exhaled and exhaled until his chest ached and black spots peppered his vision. He took off his helmet.

  Venus touched him with the coldest and most ghostly of fingers. He couldn’t take a breath, not a real one, but he could taste Venus, smacking his lips around the gasping atmosphere she offered. Her parched clouds tasted of bitter sulfur, biting salt, and a stale sterility, drier than anything he’d ever felt.

  No one had worshipped her before. The trawlers and rosettes and blastulae and all the microscopic organisms in the clouds could not. No one had loved the love goddess, and Venus had no soul because no one loved her. And les colonistes had no souls because they had no world.

  He stepped closer to the edge as his vision narrowed.

  Venus didn’t want blood. How many colonistes had she killed? Dozens? Hundreds? His mother. His sister. His brother-in-law. Venus drank blood aplenty. Venus wanted a breath of life. Venus wanted to be loved, as they did. This was their sacrifice. His helmet slipped from his fingers and rolled backward. Émile stretched out his arms. Thérèse, as naked to Venus as he, took his hand.

  He collapsed to his knees, his joints on fire with pain. Thérèse collapsed beside him, soundlessly. Heavy footfalls vibrated and someone must have pressed the emergency close panel. The big door, the eyelid for this miraculous vision, beg
an to close.

  FIVE

  “WHERE DOES GRAND-PÈRE keep his storm?” Alexis demanded. He squinted at the small monitor.

  “Grand-père is chasing it,” Pascal said.

  Alexis screwed up his face. “You chase a storm? I thought we stayed away from them.”

  “We do,” George-Étienne said. “This one is on the surface. I want to see it.”

  “Why?” Alexis said in exaggerated bafflement.

  “Because I don’t understand it! Grand-mère and I didn’t come to Venus just to get away from the cities and from an empty life. We wanted to explore, to see things no one had ever seen.”

  Alexis was getting bored.

  “There’s a storm on the surface that shouldn’t be there,” George-Étienne explained. “No one knows it exists and no one’s seen it up close, before today. We’re going to look today.”

  George-Étienne had discovered it years ago, sending a probe down to salvage lost equipment, and had found it in the same spot over the years. Pascal had inherited his father’s curiosity. Whatever strangeness lay at the deepest depths of Diana Chasma, he wanted to know it too. The chasma cut almost three kilometers into the surface, a winding trench system a thousand kilometers long, where the pressure passed ninety atmospheres. They were both captivated by the anomalous weather in those depths.

  Pascal expanded the view, but the image could only go so far before pixelating. They’d built the probe from scrap, with only the equipment it needed. Until now, it hadn’t needed a good telescope.

  “It’s a funny storm,” Pascal said gently. “There are no clouds and the air is transparent, and it’s too hot for rain, so it’s like an invisible storm, even up close. Sometimes it blows dust around, but most times it’s quiet.”

  “I don’t see it,” Alexis said, hopping off Pascal’s lap. “It’s stupid.”

  “Don’t say that about papa’s storm!” Jean-Eudes said hotly.