The House of Styx

by Derek Künsken

  “Ça va, Jean-Eudes,” George-Étienne said placatingly, wiping oils off his hands with an old towel. He peeked at the screen. “Hours yet.”

  The image in the screen grew more fine-grained every minute. Thickening atmosphere slowed the probe more and more.

  Pascal sent an instruction to the probe. Its camera eye swiveled, from straight down to a horizon view. Hundreds of kilometers away, Maat Mons towered five kilometers off the surrounding plain, its volcanic peak and shoulders shiny with frosts of bismuth and lead sulfides. He swiveled the camera down again, to the Aphrodite highlands beneath the probe and the great fields of jagged wrinkles of Nuahine Tessera, shadowless and untouchably distant. That feeling of dispossession made sense to Pascal, lived in his bones each day, woke with him each morning. They floated in the clouds, bobbing along, surviving, unable to touch, as if waiting for something unknown.

  Pascal wasn’t interested in the highlands, where windspeed never topped a few meters per second. His father’s “storm” was deeper. Despite centuries of exploration by satellite, and decades of high-altitude dirigibles and even robotic ground rovers, scientists still couldn’t decide what geological processes had formed the especially-deep Diana Chasma—so near mountains that, in some places, the terrain dropped down a straight slope for almost seven kilometers.

  The altitude of the probe reached twelve kilometers. The temperature outside had risen to three hundred and sixty degrees Celsius and the pressure to forty atmospheres.

  “Voyons, Pascal,” George-Étienne said. “You should eat something.”

  Jean-Eudes brought Pascal a thick soup and he ate it in front of the display. Pascal put his dish away when even he finally got impatient at the four-kilometer mark. The temperature outside the probe had reached four hundred and thirty degrees Celsius, and the pressure was now seventy atmospheres. Very soon, the pressure would be so great that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would take on the properties of a fluid, capable of dissolving organics, making Venus even more hostile. That was alien, even to the colonistes who lived in the clouds. George-Étienne leaned in close with Jean-Eudes.

  “You take it, Pa,” Pascal said.

  “Watch the descent speed,” George-Étienne said. “Slow it near the surface. And watch for cross-winds.”

  Pascal wanted to keep piloting the probe—which was mostly autopiloted anyway—but he didn’t want to mess this up. They were risking a lot of metal. But he knew machines. He liked machines. They were beautiful. Elegant. They were what they appeared to be. They were all surface.

  The probe’s descent speed slowed as the atmosphere thickened. He swiveled a second camera to the northeast. The closer view of the peaks and shoulders of the Nuahine Tessara was vertiginous. He was used to clouds in every direction, to a line of sight that extended no more than a few kilometers. Nuahine looked close enough to touch, even though her jagged lines lay dozens of kilometers distant. False perspective.

  The view slowed even more. The wait was no longer interminable. Even Alexis had come close to stare at the screen, draping his arms over Pascal’s shoulder. The ground closed in, all sharp lines and pebbles, as if the rock had been recently broken. Venus’s lack of rain, plate tectonics and even meaningful wind meant that the surfaces were either sharp and fragmented or rounded in whatever bulbous shape the magma had possessed when it had frozen into rock.

  Just above the base of the uneven, pebbled floor of the Diana Chasma, Pascal gave a little power to the propeller. The air was so thick at ninety-three atmospheres of pressure that the probe rose slightly before resuming its lethargic descent through an invisible bath of supercritical carbon dioxide to touch Venus. The monitor showed its big carbon-wire frame wheels bowing and steadying. The thermometer reported four hundred and sixty-five degrees.

  “I don’t see your storm, papa,” Jean-Eudes said.

  “It’s always near the northern wall of the chasma,” George-Étienne said.

  They’d landed near the target coordinates, within a trench cut three kilometers into the rock of the Rusulka Planitia south of the Ceres Corona. The floor of Diana Chasma was uneven, strewn with stones of all sizes, from sharp gravel and fines to jagged landslide debris fallen from steep walls. Pascal directed the rover forward. Although colonists on the moon and Mars and the asteroids had highly autonomous robots, none of the handy materials needed to make the processors would survive the heat of the surface, or the acid of the clouds. Anything made to work on the surface had to be designed with a minimum of moving or smart parts and made entirely of metals and ceramics that didn’t expand or deform with heat, and all of which had to be imported. So Pascal was the brain inhabiting the rover, peeking through the probe’s constricting cameras, as if through a curtain at a magical place.

  The black face of the northern wall rose up out of the line of sight. Pascal would have liked to have looked up, but it wasn’t safe to tilt the cameras too high while driving. Millennia of crumbling had deposited uneven gravel that could catch the wire wheels. As the rover neared the chasma wall, the patterns on the ground changed. The southern face of every bump and ridge was clear of dust and stones, while gravel chips and powder had gathered on the northern side, as if in the lee of a wind.

  “There shouldn’t be any wind here,” Pascal said, showing his father the video captures.

  “My storm.” George-Étienne’s subdued tone covered a youthful excitement.

  Pascal magnified one of the pictures. In the lee of heavier rocks, wind tails had formed. Fine lines of whites, grays and blacks marked the tiny piles of grit.

  “A storm wouldn’t have left all the wind tails pointing in one direction,” Pascal said, “and it wouldn’t have had time to sort grains by size.” It was a mystery, and Pascal felt his excitement growing.

  “At this pressure, even a little wind would be powerful. Keep going. We have only an hour or two before we have to bring the probe back.”

  Pascal resumed the drive, bouncing over ridges and following skirts of rockfalls fanning from the escarpment. The amount of stone and pebbles and sand continued to shrink as if the area had been partly blown clean, revealing the unevenness of the surface and immense, multi-ton boulders.

  George-Étienne pointed at the monitor. A wind blew in the direction of their travel at six kilometers an hour, slightly faster than on the surface of the highlands. It might have been just a bit of wind-tunneling, except that the wind wasn’t following the chasma; it headed northward, towards the escarpment wall. It shouldn’t have done that.

  The probe didn’t have a microphone per se, but the thick atmosphere transmitted sound very well, setting vibrations in the probe’s hard armor. When Pascal subtracted the normal vibrations of the motor and the jarring of the uneven ground, a low moaning remained.

  “That sounds like a storm!” Alexis exclaimed.

  “It might be what a storm looks like,” George-Étienne said, “on the surface.”

  A windspeed of six kilometers per hour seemed leisurely, but ninety-three atmospheres of pressure would turn that into an irresistible deep ocean current. It was strong enough to tip the probe if Pascal wasn’t careful.

  He began to get nervous. “Should we get it out of there, Pa?”

  “Why?” Alexis asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Jean-Eudes, could you take your nephew to check all the valves?” George-Étienne asked.

  Jean-Eudes’s eyebrows rose. “Oui.”

  “But what’s wrong?” Alexis whined.

  “The valves!” Jean-Eudes said emphatically. “We have to check all of them. That’s a two-man job.”

  Alexis did not look convinced and scuffed his feet on the floor as he followed Jean-Eudes to get little lamps for the task.

  On the surface, the wind had picked up to eight kilometers per hour and the sluggish response to the controls made Pascal nervous. The probe’s interior was pressurized to just two atmospheres, so on the somber surface, it was almost neutrally buoyant, with little traction. The wind rock
ed it dangerously.

  “It’s too fast,” Pascal said.

  George-Étienne expanded the view and then tagged a broken boulder almost four meters tall. “Shelter.”

  “What if the wind shifts?” Pascal asked, steering the probe across the dark rock field.

  “The wind never shifts in this storm,” George-Étienne said.

  “That’s not possible,” Pascal said. He couldn’t say more. He carefully turned the probe, hoping not to tip it.

  “Storms are different here,” Pa said. “They’re not caused by convection currents and Hadley cells. We’re the first to see this, ever, and we’re going to find out what makes it tick.”

  The probe drove across the current, its wheels dragging and hopping. For a few minutes, Pascal doubted it would reach the lee of the boulder, and a sheen of sweat formed on his face. But he got it there just before the faster wind tipped it. In a kind of terrified relief, Pascal examined the display with Pa. Other boulders blocked the view of a low rise where the wind carried swirling sand and rock chips in its flow.

  “We can’t see anything from here,” George-Étienne said with irritation.

  A mystery lived down there, and this screen was their only window into that mystery. It was a kind of telescope that they couldn’t move, and they’d reached their maximum resolution, with the seven-kilometer-tall rock face still a hundred and fifty meters away. Whatever pulled this wind hid beyond their angle of view. So close.

  “Calvaire!” George-Étienne swore.

  “What is it?” Alexis called from the other end of the Causapscal-des-Profondeurs.

  “Somebody’s going to regret it if they don’t get those valves inspected,” George-Étienne said.

  Alexis peeked around at them and then ducked his head back around the bend. That was their problem. Seeing around a bend with a probe forty-five kilometers below them.

  “Pa, how’s the spare camera on the probe?”

  “Should be in its case in the outer hatch.”

  “Are you willing to risk breaking it?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  Pascal explained nervously. George-Étienne was reluctant. He thought it risky and unlikely to work. But he had no better idea, unless they wanted to return the probe to the lower cloud decks without having seen where the wind was going. The mystery had Pascal in its claws, and had sunk them even deeper into his father.

  Pascal gave the commands for one of the manipulator arms to open an outer storage panel containing small wrenches, cable, spare manipulator arm, spare wheel, and spare cameras. Pascal attached the end of a three-hundred-meter carbon nanotube cable to the inside of the storage panel, and then got the arm to pay out meters and meters and meters of cable, until only the two ends remained affixed to the probe. The current of supercritical carbon dioxide caught loops of it and rolled them over, pulling more and more out past the boulders.

  The next part was harder. The little camera was old, just a spare, bought on the black market with hard-earned water and rare metals. The lens of industrial diamond resisted acid, but would still crack if hit the wrong way. The backup battery would last an hour, and it also had an emergency transmitter. Most important equipment on Venus did. The colonistes never trusted just wiring; acid had a way of sneaking in eventually and chewing at it. They called the phenomenon bébittes, after the bugs of Québec on Earth.

  Pascal needed both manipulator arms to attach the camera to the axle of the spare wheel and then to tie the axle to one end of the long woven carbon nanotube cable. All told, it took nearly a half hour to finish all the preparations.

  “Do you think it will work?” Pascal asked, eyeing the second screen now available to them, through the transmitter from the spare camera. The color had greened slightly, an artefact of the high-temperature circuitry nearing its tolerances.

  “Go ahead,” his father said.

  Pascal directed a manipulator arm to throw the camera and axle out of the lee of the boulder. It didn’t go far. The low-strength arm was throwing an object through a medium as dense as water. The view from the spare camera spun crazily, until it sank with slow deliberateness to strike the hard basalt. It bounced once, then rolled lethargically. Black rock filled two-thirds of the screen, but then the view rotated in a dizzying spin.

  The surface wind rolled the wheel and camera along drunkenly until the drag of the long cable angled the camera forward. Then the weight of the wind scraped the spare wheel forward, like a drogue chute. The view bumped and jumped along the rock, most often with the camera facing forward. It staggered around boulders, swept by eddies, and picked up speed. When it hit the base of the slope, the slow-moving weight of the ninety-three atmospheres of carbon dioxide began pushing it upwards inexorably.

  “Sapristi!” George-Étienne said. “You did it!”

  “What did he do?” Alexis called plaintively from the galley.

  “Come see.”

  Alexis ran and Jean-Eudes followed, and while they both made noises of astonishment, after a time, they found the view less remarkable than they’d expected. The hopping, dizzying view of the camera slowly followed the wind up the slope. Alexis slipped away to his room. Jean-Eudes returned to checking the valves. The camera view topped the rise, and a heavily-eroded cave mouth came into view. The image stopped advancing, but the wind buffeted the camera left and right.

  “We’ll figure out how to process these to get some good stills,” George-Étienne said.

  Pascal paid out more cable and the view from the spare camera swayed more wildly in the wind. At fifteen kilometers per hour, the density and weight of the air gave it more force than even a category seven hurricane on Earth. And the wind was blowing into the cave.

  “Where the hell is all that air going?” George-Étienne asked in astonishment. “Maybe it comes out of a hole at a different altitude? Like a gopher hole.”

  Pascal didn’t comment. His father occasionally made references to the Earth of his boyhood that meant nothing to his children. But the atmosphere of Venus at this depth distributed pressure evenly, so wind being sucked into this hole couldn’t be explained by the pressure difference with the other end of the tunnel, even if it somehow emerged at the top of the escarpment seven kilometers above them.

  “We can’t see in the dark,” Pascal said, with disappointment. He hadn’t prepared for any of this.

  The spare camera didn’t have a lot of extra features. It had a grainy IR camera, more for taking the temperature of its environment than for resolving images. He flipped the view to IR and the world became blotchy and indistinct. Useless. Except that the cave was cooler ahead of them: four hundred and twenty degrees, compared to the four hundred and eighty around the probe. He pointed at the reading.

  “Venturi effect?” George-Étienne said, shaking his head. “The air is moving so fast through the tunnel that the pressure and temperature are dropping. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Pascal switched the camera back to visual band. The image became scratchy.

  “What’s wrong?” George-Étienne asked. “The shaking getting too bad?”

  “I don’t know. The transmission isn’t great. Maybe the transmitter’s already giving out? It’s just an old camera. The transmitter’s not made for this range.”

  “Can you turn on the light?”

  “It’s not very bright, and it’ll use up the battery even faster,” Pascal said.

  “We’re already having transmitter trouble and we can’t see into the cave,” his father said. “Let’s have a quick look. I don’t know when we’ll have a chance to come back. It’s far windier than I ever thought, too much to risk a probe again.”

  Pascal switched on the light, which, in the outside gloom, didn’t help much. But he slowly had the cable unspool and the camera, still ducking erratically in the wind, began to enter the cave. Twice, the spare wheel protecting the camera hit the sides of the cave, but the diamond lens didn’t crack.

  The little light swung dizzyingly
, showing near-random partial views of the cave. The walls were unlike anything they’d seen before. The basaltic rock, old and volcanic, was polished smooth, every outcropping and bump rounded.

  Erosion. They were seeing erosion, and not just a bit. The smooth walls reflected light. These surfaces had been scoured by wind for years, maybe centuries. Only the rare wind blew faster than five kilometers per hour in the deep ocean of supercritical carbon dioxide on the rest of the surface of Venus, except for this one spot, where wind had been cutting for ages. How?

  The image filled with static, even though the camera had only reached ten meters into the cave.

  “We may lose the signal soon,” Pascal said, paying out another five meters of cable.

  “Is it recording?” his father asked.

  “The camera’s memory buffer is tiny. I’ve got it snapping pictures and storing environmental measurements every ten seconds.”

  “Let’s go as far as our cable will take us,” George-Étienne said.

  The spare wheel containing the camera began slamming into the wall of the cave.

  “Crisse!” Pascal said. “The cave is turning and we’re caught in turbulence.”

  He unspooled cable quickly. The image became grainier, but the camera hung steady now, maybe caught in the lee of an outcropping on the bend in the cave. It swung lazily, slowing and unwinding its tension until it looked quietly at a depression in the wall, where sand and grit had collected. The grit occasionally made small, furtive movements, like silt caught in the wind, but the current of the eddy kept bringing it back to its little drift.

  “I’ve got about fifteen more meters of cable,” Pascal said. “Want to risk it?”

  “Vas-y,” George-Étienne said quietly.

  Pascal signalled the probe to unspool the last fifteen meters of cable. The image spun disorientingly again, dropping deeper and deeper into the cave with the current. Side channels fed wind current into the main channel. The image became so grainy and static-filled that they couldn’t make much out at all. He toggled to infrared.

  The temperature had by now dropped to three hundred and ninety degrees and the pressure to fifty atmospheres, conditions that they shouldn’t have found below nine kilometers of altitude. That was a measure of how fast the wind was blowing through the tunnel.